The biggest challenge with inline styling, months down the road when new team members join, especially designers. They have to start sifting through external style sheets, can’t find it there, then search through the HTML. Nope not there either. Ahhhhh…. There it is. Amidst this freakish looking HTML/ XML’ish sitting between lines of ES6 code. Front End Devs may be ok with this, many Designers are going to find this challenging. Especially now the CSS is chained to the logic. Changes could seriously break an app.

I don’t see inline CSS as a long term maintainable option especially in turnover projects that incur new staff. I’ve always been a big fan of the MVC pattern and separation of HTML, JS and CSS as their own entity. It really does make targeting corrections simple, debugging doesn’t require rocket science and most important it cuts down on the need for additional libraries to now make CSS work in JS.

While this pattern of development has taken off like wildfire. To realize that a ‘Hello World’ base React application utilizing Webpack can generate 19,000 lines of code is rather alarming. We just keep adding to that technical deficit with each new library required to make something rather simple happen.

I do hope by 2017 this trend fizzles out!