It is usually a good idea to put style information in an external style sheet or a style element in the head of an XHTML or HTML file. Occasionally, or perhaps on a temporary basis, you may use a style attribute on a particular element, instead. Even more rarely, you may want to represent one or more characters in the style attribute using character escapes.

A style attribute in XHTML or HTML can represent characters using NCRs, entities or CSS escapes. On the other hand, the style element in HTML can contain neither NCRs nor entities, and the same applies to an external style sheet.

Because there is a tendency to want to move styles declared in attributes to the style element or an external style sheet (for example, this might be done automatically using an application or script), it is safest to use only CSS escapes.

For example, it is better to use

<span style="font-family: L\FC beck">...</span>

than

<span style="font-family: L&#xFC;beck">...</span>