An apparatus and method for enabling composite style sheet application to multi-part electronic documents is provided. The apparatus and method identify content of a requested electronic document and determine subset style sheets that correspond to the identified content. Certain ones of these subset style sheets are selected based on, for example, requesting device characteristics, for use in generating a composite style sheet. The selected subset style sheets are then merged with a global style sheet to generate a composite style sheet that may be applied to the electronic document for proper presentation on a requesting device.