Re: Idea for W3C on improving stylesheets

>  Would it be possible to say, in a future version on
> style sheets, send down ALL of the possible style
> commands for formatting ONLY ONCE when a user first
> browses to a domain.

Your logic doesn't work, because first off, a browser, when visiting a page,
always checks to see if it's getting the latest page or not. I believe it
does this by checking the size/datestamp on the file. So already here, the
browser will scan for a CSS file, and check it's date, and NOT download it,
if it's the one it already has.

Your StyleExpires command is reminicent of cookies. Which I'm not that cool
about. Cookies are always sent, to the server, regardless of any information
that may bind it to the "expire". Say you're doing development, and you
accidentally set the expire tag to 100 years? You're users gonna be pretty
stuck. Of course, you could start engaging in cookie style communication,
with stylesheets just instead, but then I just dont see where you save any
"chatter" as you put it, as the browser is checking the size/date stamp
anyway :)

And you of course, also get into the mess with what styles apply to what
pages. Should a stylesheet be totally domain specific? What if you want
something else? What if the user homers ISP provided www adress is a
subfolder to some domain? Should the stylesheet then cascade down into that?

Trust me, the way CSS is delivered today, you're not gonna slim it much more
down. And would it be worth it? The CSS wouldn't change, only a few
calls/checks on a file would.

<svend/>
www.svendtofte.com

PS: By the way, I'm not sure about how the browser works, I might be
mistaken, but I do not believe the whole CSS file is downloaded each time,
I'm pretty sure (but wouldn't say for certain), that the browser just checks
for some date/size thing.

Received on Friday, 13 September 2002 05:47:42 UTC