Externally linked sources introduce a backward-compatibility problem of their own. E.g, I recall early versions of IE only supporting inline JS. So, if you want to support as much as possible as far back as possible, inlining is the way to go.
(Since any extensions had this problem, when they were introduced, they all support enclosing HTML comments. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been any chance for becoming broadly adopted.)
Regarding dithering: I recall a few sites with duotone dithering, which was a nice effect. And, of course, to bring down file sizes and optimize results, you could always manually compose from dithered and undithered images using the same palette.
> Externally linked sources introduce a backward-compatibility problem of their own. E.g, I recall early versions of IE only supporting inline JS. So, if you want to support as much as possible as far back as possible, inlining is the way to go.
That was part of the reason for inlining the CSS. The other part (which I didn’t explain in the post) actually came about because of Mosaic.
Even though it didn’t support CSS, it was aware of link tags and added a button to the top of the window for each one (literally linking to the referenced file). I couldn’t dig up a way to disable that within the code, so I went with the commented-out inline method to get the experience I was looking for.
Regarding Mosaic: One way around would have been outputting the stylesheet links via JS `document.write()` and user-agent filtering, since every browser that supports CSS also supports JS. Anyways, an interesting detail about Mosaic!
P.S.: Now I'm not sure, if this would generally work in the head section, since with older browsers the `document` object became only available as the body tag was encountered. Or was this just for the properties and `write()` was available anyways? (This behavior changed with NS4/IE4.)
(Since any extensions had this problem, when they were introduced, they all support enclosing HTML comments. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been any chance for becoming broadly adopted.)
Regarding dithering: I recall a few sites with duotone dithering, which was a nice effect. And, of course, to bring down file sizes and optimize results, you could always manually compose from dithered and undithered images using the same palette.