Inline styles cannot be cached, cannot be overridden without !important, and re-download on every page. Past a few hundred, they are measurably larger than the stylesheet they replaced.
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How this rule is weighted
- Importance
- 4 / 10
- How much this matters relative to other rules.
- Confidence
- RESEARCH
- Backed by large-sample study or industry research, not a specification.
- Severity
- warning
- How the finding is presented when it fails.
- Scoring
- Counts
- A failure costs points in its category.
Impact is importance multiplied by the confidence tier’s weight — SPECIFICATION 1.0, RESEARCH 0.7, EMERGING 0.3, EXPERIMENTAL 0.1. Two rules backed by the same class of evidence therefore always carry the same weight, which is what makes the score reproducible rather than hand-tuned.
Questions about this rule
- Does CSS_NO_STYLE_ATTR_OVERUSE affect my score?
- Yes. It is an importance 4 rule at RESEARCH confidence, so a failure costs 4 × 0.7 points of impact in the CSS category before that category is normalised to 100.
- What does RESEARCH confidence mean?
- Backed by large-sample study or industry research, not a specification. Confidence is a declared tier rather than a per-rule number, so every rule backed by the same class of evidence carries the same weight - which is what makes the score reproducible instead of hand-tuned.
- How do I check CSS_NO_STYLE_ATTR_OVERUSE on my own site?
- Paste your URL into the box above and it runs only this rule, usually in a couple of seconds. It is also included in the CSS checker and in a full scan.
Tags
- css
- performance
Related CSS rules
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- Declaration values match their property grammarEach value is matched against the property's formal grammar from the CSS specifications. A value that does not match is dropped at parse time, so the declaration has no effect even though the property name is correct.CSS_W3C_INVALID_VALUE
- Declarations use real CSS propertiesEach property name is checked against the machine-readable index of properties defined in the CSS specifications. An unknown property is almost always a typo no browser will honour.CSS_W3C_UNKNOWN_PROPERTY
- No CSS expression() usageA legacy Internet Explorer feature that executes JavaScript from CSS - both obsolete and a script-injection vector.CSS_NO_EXPRESSION
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- CSS features work in every major browserEach CSS property is resolved against the Baseline dataset behind MDN and caniuse. Flagged when a desktop engine does not support it. Mobile-only gaps are excluded - `cursor` is absent from iOS Safari by design, not omission.CSS_BASELINE_LIMITED