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calguy1000 wrote: I had an idea last night about speeding up stylesheets.

The problem exists that stylesheets were not getting cached in the browser... and this was due to a lack of understanding of how the cache stuff worked wrt http headers.

So I did some research and think I finally understand it, and I began working on a solution.

a) I modified the {stylesheet} tag to output seperate links to each stylesheet by cssid and to do database lookups
    to convert stylesheet name to id where necessary.
b) I modified the stylesheet.php to tread a cache file (tmp/cache/csshash.dat) which contains an md5sum of the
    css in the stylesheet and a stylesheet id as a key.
    - if the key does not exist for a particular stylesheet id, then the stylesheet is read, output, and the
      md5sum cache updated.  I then output the new md5sum and a last-modified date.
    - if the key does exist, and the hash matches that supplied by the browser, then an "HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified"
      result is returned.

Preliminary results indicate a dramatic performance improvement because stylesheets can now be cached on the browser.
[..]

A lot of effort just to stick to dynamic stylesheets ... I will still prefer a "real" static CSS. The reason?
With a "real" CSS you can work *much* faster: You simply install the Web Developer Extension for Firefox, and you can work on your CSS in *realtime* - your screen updates as you type along - then you just save your modified CSS and upload via FTP and you're done.