Unstyled content

[zcorpan]

Sometimes when I load the forums the style sheets aren't applied. Using Opera. Dunno if it happens in other browsers. If it's a bug in Opera, let me know.

[JAB Creations]

I haven't switched to Opera just yet (time has been the main issue and I have to report a few bugs in regards to the GUI) though I have Opera open pretty much every day and use it as my second browser very often so I've noticed when it opens up and restores tabs that it's loading from the cache on the hard drive to restore the previous session ASAP. That however will not load the latest copy of a page from the internet itself.

[Xdega]

Is this issue specific to theese forums? are you noticing it anywhere else?

[zcorpan]

It only happens for me here, yeah. Got it once with the new theme, too. Haven't got around to debugging it, I hoped you would while you're changing stuff

[Xdega]

My first thought is a potential issue due to a .htaccess redirect that I needed to do. This was in order to redirect forums.whatwg.org/ to forums.whatwg.org/bb3 here . But I think that is kinda a long shot.

for clarification here is the .htaccess that we are using:

Code: Select all

DirectoryIndex index.php
RedirectMatch permanent ^/$ http://forums.whatwg.org/bb3/index.php


There may be syntactical errors in the .htaccess as it I am not an apache expert. Possible the "DirectoryIndex" is causing us problems.

Again, this very likely isn't our problem, but I will research it a little more.

[JAB Creations]

Why are the URL's being changed? The URL's seem longer which is less friendly than shorter URL's.

In fact why are the forums being changed so much to begin with? I'm not opposed to change if there is a need though I'm not really aware of what those needs are at this point.

[Xdega]

The url is a redirect because our current site had to be installed in to a new directory.
I do not have DNS access to point "forums.whatwg.org" to the current path of these forums, besides using apache settings (.htaccess).

As for the forum changes in general, I will have to agree with the suggestion posted by a blog reader:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4585#p6938

A default install of PHPBB3.0 is telling people that we are either:
a) An official PHPBB website (or very close affiliate).
b) forums in the process of being installed
c) too lazy to set up our own "identity"

[zcorpan]

I don't think it has anything to do with the redirect. I think it's something with one of the scripts. If I disable scripting, I don't get unstyled content and moreover I don't get the jumpyness on page load, either. I don't know what the scripts do other than enable the font size buttons, which are stupid anyway -- maybe we can just remove the scripts?

[Xdega]

I don't think it has anything to do with the redirect. I think it's something with one of the scripts. If I disable scripting, I don't get unstyled content and moreover I don't get the jumpyness on page load, either. I don't know what the scripts do other than enable the font size buttons, which are stupid anyway -- maybe we can just remove the scripts?

I will check in to this, I want to get full information on what this would affect beforehand though. Agreed though that the font size button is useless, does anyone even use such things?

[zcorpan]

I changed a few things in the header template, commented out some things, and now it seems I don't get any jumpyness while loading nor unstyled content even with scripting enabled. Let me know if I broke something.

[zcorpan]

Actually I hadn't got rid of the jumpiness, but now I've put all the scripts first and then all the styles, which means that the browser won't force a layout because a script asked for layout information before all styles had loaded (I assume that was the reason for jumpiness), and now everything seems stable while loading.

[Xdega]

nice work.

[zcorpan]

I still haven't really nailed it. However, I think I know now what the problem is. The style.php file is refetched every time, and it takes a while before it starts loading and it takes a while to download, too. If we can edit the style.php file to include a proper Expires header that allows the browser to cache the style sheet then we should easily half the page loading time for all pages in the forums (it seems all other resources are cached, it's just the page itself and style.php that shows up in my network log).

[zcorpan]

For now I inlined all of style.php into the header template, which as expected fixed the jumpy loading and boosted the loading time from ~1200ms to ~500ms. Still not ideal since a cached external style sheet is best practice, but will do for now. However, it also had unintended concequences of messing with the colors. Oops. Too tired to figure out why that happened right now, but I'll take a stab at trimming the styles later (it seems half of the style rules are overridden by other style rules anyway).