Sorry I wasn’t clear in my comment. What I said about SEO wasn’t directed at you sorry, its something I was refeering to in general as I often see it said that valid css helps SEO. My comments are also intended to help beginners.

Yes you are right! Keep in mind this is a beginners article and no where in it did i say validating your CSS will help your SEO. I was pointing out that validating your code is a good idea. Not all beginners are smart enough to know if a tag wasn’t closed in there CSS file. So a simple validation check would reveal that. I appreciate the depth of your comment, but you have to consider the audience this was geared towards.

Validating CSS has absolutely no bearing on your site what so ever. The browser will either interpret what’s in the file or it will not and saying it’s good for SEO is a load of tosh frankly.

Search engines to not ‘look’ at how a site is presented visually. They couldn’t care a monkeys what’s in that stylesheet. They only care about data and structure. Imporant ‘data’ is determined by the ‘structure’ not if something is red and bold, search engines just dont work in that way. Hence hence validating your actual html markup is far more important than validating the aesthetics (css).

Validating your CSS also does not in any way mean that the site will render as you wish it to and it does not reflect the skill of the stylist. What reflects the true skill of the stylist is their approach to creating a maintainable, scalable stylesheet. Having valid CSS does not necessarily guarantee this and in fact I have come across valid stylesheets which have been horrendous to maintain and add new elements to. CSS is a dark art, which is easy to learn but hard to master properly.

Many people also forget the ‘Cascade’ element of CSS. If you structure your stylesheet well you can avoid ‘Cascading’ problems. Always remember that stuff up the top can be over ridden by stuff at the bottom. Place your declarations correctly and you shouldn’t have any cascading issue – which can be a nightmare to track down.

I usually place the main structural elements at the top of the stylesheet and work from there down. Inside my declarations I also put structure before cosmetics. So float, position, width etc goes before color, backgrounds, borders etc.

Its also extremely good practice to comment sections of your stylesheet as they can help you and others immensely. In fact I would say commenting people should be far more concerned with good comments than validations. At least it provides something tangible and usful unlike validation which gives you a little badge to say your site is valid – do me a favour.

As far as inline styles are concerned, I agree. After IE6/7 they the scourge of my day job, use them only in firebug. If for some obscure reason your forced into using them then put them before your class or id attributes because at least then they can be over ridden in your stylesheet at a later date. Really speaking though your html pages should only contain structural and data elements. All cosmetic work should be in the stylesheet.