[wp-trac] Re: [WordPress Trac] #3372: Consolidated JavaScript/CSS Plugin API

[WordPress Trac]

#3372: Consolidated JavaScript/CSS Plugin API
-----------------------------+----------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  robertaccettura  |        Owner:  anonymous
     Type:  enhancement      |       Status:  new      
 Priority:  low              |    Milestone:  2.8      
Component:  Optimization     |      Version:  2.1      
 Severity:  minor            |   Resolution:           
 Keywords:                   |  
-----------------------------+----------------------------------------------
Comment (by xenlab):

 This is a great idea. On other systems that I've done this with, the
 bandwidth and HTTP request savings were ENORMOUS! For high traffic sites
 (1M+ per day) you'd be silly not to do this, since saving those extra
 requests mean you can serve more traffic with the same hardware stack.
 I've seen it. It really is amazing.

 With the evangelizing aside, I want to address a couple of comments, and
 then add my own two cents...

 First styles never conflict, they cascade. The order the files are added
 should be something that is respected. I believe this is already being
 taken into account. If you are using conditionals, they will probably go
 under the aggregated file and pick up the cascade (applying only to IE)
 after the fact, to fix IE's lovely bugs.

 If scripts are conflicting, then there is a problem long before the
 aggregation takes hold. All this should do is concatenate the files, one
 after the other, into one 'super' file, so that is only one file to be
 served up.

 This shouldn't be done dynamically on each page load. The file should be
 created and cached to disk. This way the file can be pre-generated on the
 first request, but fetched from disk on all other requests.

 While there would be a little processing overhead upfront, I think it
 should md5 the file contents and use this hash as the file name. This way
 if new files are added, they could be checked against the hash and regen'd
 as needed. This has the added benefit of always serving a fresh aggregate
 file if the contents have changed, forcing user agents to update their
 local cache because the md5 hash file name would change. Speed tests would
 need to be performed as this may be more trouble than its worth, but
 md5'ing at least the original file names would be a good way to come up
 with a naming convention.

 In addition you should include a way to for scripts to be able to 'target'
 wp_head or wp_footer. This way you can add some scripts in the header if
 that's whats needed but put the majority of scripts near the footer so
 that they fire after the page has loaded. This could be easily
 accomplished with a paramater to the add_js function.

 And last but not least, we should be gziping the file that's output.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3372#comment:11>
WordPress Trac <http://trac.wordpress.org/>
WordPress blogging software