This might be the kind of problem only I have, but I thought I'd share in case others are in a similar pickle.
Warming Up
First of all, the way my personal site works is that every rendered page gets cached as rendered HTML. Midway, storing the rendered page in the cache, an optimization transformation happens. It basically takes HTML like this:
<html>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="vendor.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="stuff.css">
<body>...</body>
</html>
into this:
<html>
<style>
/* optimized contents of vendor.css and stuff.css minified */
</style>
<body>...</body>
</html>
Just right-click and "View Page Source" and you'll see.
When it does this it also filters out CSS selectors in those .css files that aren't actually used in the rendered HTML. This makes the inlined CSS much smaller. Especially since so much of the CSS comes from a CSS framework.
However, there are certain .css files that have references to selectors that aren't in the generated HTML but are needed later when some JavaScript changes the DOM based on AJAX or user actions. For example, the CSS used by the Autocompeter widget. The program that does this CSS optimization transformation is called mincss and it has a feature where you can tell it to NOT bother with certain CSS selectors (using a CSS comment) or certain <link> tags entirely. It looks like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="ajaxstuff.css" data-mincss="no">
Where Does django-pipeline Come In?
So, setting that data-mincss="no" isn't easy when you use django-pipeline because you don't write <link ... in your Django templates, you write {% stylesheet 'name-of-bundle %}. So, how do you get it in?
Well, first let's define the bundle. In my case it looks like this:
PIPELINE_CSS = {
...
# Bundle of CSS that strictly isn't needed at pure HTML render-time
'base_dynamic': {
'source_filenames': (
'css/transition.css',
'autocompeter/autocompeter.min.css',
),
'extra_context': {
'no_mincss': True,
},
'output_filename': 'css/base-dynamic.min.css',
},
...
}
But that isn't enough. Next, I need to override how django-pipeline turn that block into a <link ...> tag. To do that, you need to create a directory and file called pipeline/css.html (or pipeline/css.jinja if you use Jinja rendering by default).
So take the default one from inside the pipeline package and copy it into your project into one of your apps's templates directory. For example, in my case, peterbecom/apps/base/templates/pipeline/css.jinja. Then, in that template add at the very end somehting like this:
{% if no_mincss %} data-mincss="no"{% endif %} />
The Point?
The point is that if you're in a similar situation where you want django-pipeline to output the <link> or <script> tag differently than it's capable of, by default, then this is a good example of that.
Comments
Hi Peter,
What I have been made to believe is that the advantage of separate, fixed css files is that they can be cached by the browser. I would like to understand what benefit would in-lining the css provide ? Could you please explain that ?
Regards
Vishal
Read your other post. Understood your point. Thanks.