Webmaster Forum / HTML, CSS, Scripts / CSS / June 2005

This makes sense if you've got CSS rules that are appropriate (or likely to
be appropriate) for braille (both refreshable displays and embossed paper),
handheld devices, print, projection displays, screen displays, speech, tty,
tv displays, and any other media types that might come along. Those rules
could go in the media="all" style sheet.

Do you? If not, then stick to media-specific style sheets. Although you can
also specify multiple media (e.g., media="print,projection") when
appropriate.

You can do the same sort of thing in the stylesheet too.  Thus, all pages
that referred to a default stylesheet now, could later be styled to suit
specific media, without needing to edit the pages, just by editing the
default stylesheet, so long as you authored the pages in a sensible manner
in the first place.

e.g. In the pages just link to one style sheet.
    In the CSS use @media to separate the different sections.

    @media all {
        some common rules...
    }

    @media screen, display {
        some rules...
    }

    @media print {
        some rules...
    }

Of course this isn't brilliantly efficient cachewise (where browsers that
didn't support braille could avoid loading a braille stylesheet), but if
the CSS file is small enough that may be immaterial.  And it's been my
experience that MSIE fetches all CSS files, even if it's not going to use
them (e.g. it fetches alternate stylesheets, but cannot use them).