What is a disadvantage of using inline styles in HTML?

Using inline styles in HTML creates a disadvantage because they lead to difficult maintenance and blur the separation between structure and presentation. Inline styles are applied directly within the HTML elements, which means that they mix content (HTML) with style (CSS). This practice makes it challenging to maintain and update styles consistently across a website.

When every element has its own style defined inline, making changes requires searching through the entire markup to find and modify those styles individually. This can be time-consuming and error-prone, especially in larger projects, where a single style might be applied to multiple elements.

Additionally, the concept of Separation of Concerns, which advocates keeping HTML (structure), CSS (presentation), and JavaScript (behavior) distinct from one another, is compromised with inline styles. This limits the effectiveness of CSS by preventing developers from utilizing the cascading nature of stylesheets effectively and can result in redundancy in style definitions.

Moreover, this approach can complicate the process of ensuring responsiveness across devices, as managing styles for various screen sizes typically requires more comprehensive CSS strategies rather than individual inline styles. This makes relying solely on inline styles less desirable for modern web development practices.