> One is that your page should work without javascript
Universal rendering would send straight HTML with inline styles to the browser. And plenty of web applications need JS to function properly.
Universal rendering would send straight HTML with inline styles to the browser. And plenty of web applications need JS to function properly.
Also, sending prerendered pages with inline styles causes a bandwidth problem. Your prerendered page is probably dynamic and uncacheable, but your stylesheet isnt. By using inline styles, you send tons of repetitive uncacheable styles over the network where you could have just used a stylesheet.
If you need the power that a full general purpose programming language gives you for some of your stylesheet, go ahead and use inline styles where needed, that's why they exist. But there's no reason that you should then decide that all of your styles ought to be inline.
We also need to think about number of round-trips. If you're on an old phone on a 3G connection in India, the extra round-trip from requesting the HTML then requesting the CSS makes a difference.
I'm super interested about the performance aspect, too, but I feel like we need numbers to really go into detail. There's way too many factors at play here for the correct answer to be obvious.
If your stylesheets are properly versioned, they can be cached forever, which means exactly the same number of requests as inline styles with much less bandwidth use.
I agree that it's a special case, but it's one we shouldn't just ignore.