[drupal-devel] CSS bloat

[K B]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 16:46:52 +0100, Richard Bennett
<richard.bennett at skynet.be> wrote:
> On Saturday 12 March 2005 14:33, K B wrote:
> > I previously reported this, and it is not only true for CSL themes,
> > but is a general trend now.
> >
> > For example, using pushbutton on my sites, the two css files
> > (style.css and drupal.css) amount for about 20% of my total bandwidth.
> > As an example, February stats show, 11.84% for style.css and 7.61%,
> > for a total of 19.45%
> 
> Normally this is negated by the fact that CSS files are cached by the browser,
> so they are only requested once per session.
> Could it be that using the no-cache headers means css files are now no longer
> being cached? This could explain an increased bandwidth use.

 I have been told that before, but I do not think it is true. I have
checked the logs on a mirror copy of my site locally, and saw that the
web server logs get 304 on both css files, meaning that the browser
does indeed cache them.

Perhaps it is my sites nature that they get more unique visitors that
returning ones, but the fact remains true that the css files form 20%
of bandwidth for Drupal.

Prior to that theme, I used a modifed bluemarine stylesheet and things
were not as bad.

If you compare pushbutton to some of the newer themes, those new ones
are more bloated.

I was contemplating editing the style sheets, partially using a
script, to remove all unneeded whitespace and newlines. That would
make them less readable, but should save some bytes.

I guess the best solution is to gzip the style sheets too.