Re: Alternative Style Sheets

On 10/12/12 10:58 AM, Eric A. Meyer wrote:
>     Even if browsers were suddenly to promote alternative style sheets
> front and center, I'd be concerned about performance.  With five
> alternate style sheets, I'd expect UAs to prefetch all five

For what it's worth, Gecko does fetch alternate stylesheets.  It does 
this at very low priority.  It does not prefetch them, ever.

> and  possibly also all the images they all reference

Again, Gecko already don't fetch the images stylesheets reference until 
they're actually used, because it's common for site-wide stylesheets to 
have tons of images with only a few used on any given page.

> and on and on.

I agree that UAs would need to be a bit careful here, but there really 
isn't that much to worry about in terms of performance.  The biggest 
issue is actually the need to have a CSSOM for all those stylesheets and 
the resulting memory use.

> There would likely also be privacy questions to worry about.

Which ones?  I can't think of any that are not already present with 
normal stylesheets, but if you have specific concerns I'd love to hear 
about it!

>     And in all honesty, I'm not sure how interested users are (or ever
> were) in "re-skinning" the sites they visit.

Pretty common for forums.  Or Bugzilla.  ;)

But yes, not so much for your typical news site.

-Boris

Received on Friday, 12 October 2012 15:19:47 UTC