When CSS Blocks
One particular pattern [for loading non-critical CSS] I’ve seen is the preload/polyfill pattern. With this approach, you load any stylesheets as preloads instead, and then use their
onloadevents to change them back to a stylesheet once the browser has them ready.
So you’re trying to make your stylesheet more async, but it causes two big problems:
- You’ve kicked up the priority of the downloading higher than any other asset.
- You’ve blocked the HTML parser too (because of the polyfill as an inline script).
Firefox does something fancy to avoid problem #2 in this particular case, but it affects every other browser.
I’ve never had good luck with fancy techniques to trick the browser into theoretically better downloading/rendering patterns. I’m kind of a stylesheets in the head, scripts at the end of the body kinda guy, but I know the web is a complicated place. In fact, in a quick peek, I see that Jetpack is inserting an inline script into my , so that would affect my loading too, except they load it with an obfuscated type until later scripts execute and change it, probably to avoid this exact problem.
Anyway, Tim’s advice:
• If you’re using loadCSS with the preload/polyfill pattern, switch to the
• If you have any external stylesheets that you’re loading normally (that is, as a regular stylesheet link), move any and all inline scripts that you can above it in the markup
• Inline your critical CSS for the fastest possible start render times.
The print pattern being:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/my.css" media="print" onload="this.media='all'">Direct Link to Article — Permalink
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