Use multiple external style sheets or as few as possible? pros and cons

[johndo]

I was doing a search about CSS best practices, thinking about what are the best practices to maintain my code and I read something that is really against almost all I've learned, but it comes from google.I always prefer to use multiple stylesheets. I find it better to maintain the code, and also my code won't load several css classes that won't be used.Google developer guides us to exactly the oposite:\[quote\] Combining external stylesheets into as few files as possible cuts down on RTTs and delays in downloading other resources.\[/quote\]Here are some rules of thumb for combining your CSS files in production, also recommended by them:[*]Partition the CSS into 2 files each: one CSS file containing the minimal code needed to render the page at startup; and one CSS file containing the code that isn't needed until the page load has completed.[*]Serve CSS of a rarely visited component in its own file. Serve the file only when that component is requested by a user.[*]For CSS that shouldn't be cached, consider inlining it.[*]Don't use CSS @import from a CSS file.Really... Google recommends inline css when the css would not be cached?? or use the less css files as possible? (sure we should not use a css for every thing, but we I always read experient web-designers recommending to use multiple style sheets, so i'm really confused (if it wasn't coming from google, i'd ignore but as it is, I thought about asking stackoverflow's users opinion, because I think it can be helpful to others too).PS: You can find here the address of the information I posted.