As long your site uses limited styles and if your content presentation logic is simple and does not change much with time , you can afford to store your styles in static files.
What do I do when the styles change very often ?
Simple answer . Store all of them in a database table .
Is’nt a Database solution for just CSS a overkill ?
Might be , but if your business demands constant changes and you want to have control over style changes and avoid conflicts.
A Style Configuration Database is the way to go.Its surely a overkill for the small sites or sites with limited stylesheets.But when maintenance becomes a problem and when confusion creeps into styles, its high time you build a simple system to handle this.
What to store and what not to store ?
Avoid storing single styles.Storing entire stylesheets would be a good idea.A Content Diff logic which will track revisions will be good enough.
Database Reads are expensive.Avoid them.
A good idea will be to cahe the CSS files on the disk. Almost all popular web languages have some caching solution.
Who can benefit the most from this ?
Multilingual Sites
Sites which offer Personalization / theming options
Presentation rich sites which may me have heavy styling (Not RIAs )
