[theme-reviewers] Embedding inline JavaScript in <head>?

Tue Oct 16 20:18:42 UTC 2012

I'm torn on this. On the one hand creating and hooking a function to invoke
another function to include a file that is 1 line long just feels wrong.
It's like the US spending a million dollars to make a pen that writes in
space when the Russians just used pencils.

On the other hand, the enqueue system is great and exists for a reason
(plus it keeps code neater for ocd people). And one more enqueue isn't
going to be a perceptable difference in processing time in 99% of scenarios.

On the third hand, why allow users to print "raw" css for custom headers
and backgrounds when this could also be wholly accomplished by enqueuing a
bootstrapped php file with CSS headers as a style sheet? What's good for
the goose, etc.

While performance differences are trivial, they are real, and unless
there's a compelling reason for not allowing people to include one line
scripts directly or by hooking and anonymous function that echos the script
(is that any better?), I think it should be up to the theme author.
On Oct 16, 2012 12:49 PM, "Otto" <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 12:08 PM, Chip Bennett <chip at chipbennett.net>
> wrote:
> > Is there any particular reason that such a script can't be enqueued like
> > most other scripts, that would warrant such an exception?
>
> No, but I would still advocate allowing it for small scripts. Define
> "small scripts" arbitrarily. Say, less than 8 lines.
>
> The biggest reason to allow it is simply one of speed. Enqueuing
> forces you to have the script in a separate file, and adds the
> overhead of an extra HTTP request for the most common cases. For a
> single line of JS, this is a lot of unnecessary extra overhead.
> Especially when the script has no dependencies and is simply a shiv to
> do one particular thing. In this case, he's wanting to change no-js
> classes to js classes, via js, which makes sense for allowing pure CSS
> to handle the no-js case gracefully.
>
> The thinking is along the same lines as the "data URI" scheme, where
> you can include binary data like images inline to CSS or HTML as
> base64 text. For small files, the setup and teardown and data transfer
> overhead of an HTTP connection is quite a bit slower than simply
> always serving the file. You lose caching benefits in some cases, but
> at a certain point of smallness, it's worth that minor overhead to
> eliminate a larger overhead.
>
> -Otto
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