CSS import font link description - css

#import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Ubuntu');
What is meant by css?family=font-family
after the last /. I didn't understand what the code means. Can anyone describe them briefly

that's a GET parameter to which the script can react
css will most likely lead to a file named index.php in the css directory, ? indicates a GET parameter and ?family=Ubuntu' indicates that the familiy GET parameter value is Ubuntu, which the php script will use to deliver the right font.

It has no special meaning in CSS. It is just part of the URL.
The server will (probably using a server side programming language to dynamically generate some data using the values in the URL) serve up the requested stylesheet.

Related

Coding with Sublime Text - having trouble with filepath's in css

So I code in Sublime Text 2 combining HTML, CSS, and jQuery to make web designs.
For some reason, when I am trying to specify a location of a file, say Pic01.jpg in the folder images, you would suspect typing in /images/Pic01.jpg should be enough to tell the browser where the picture is located.
But this is not the case. I find myself needing to specify the exact location of the file before the browser will render it. Like; User/Desktop/siteOne/images/Pic01.jpg
This path system is very inconvenient, as I would like to say - export my sites to different computers, but now the code is bound to that specific location on that specific computer.
How can I set it up to make /images/Pic01.jpg sufficient coding for the browser (or Sublime?) to understand what needs to be rendered?
Prepending the path by / means that it will start it search at the root, which can change depending on your server configuration.
With WAMP/MAMP, I have to prepend my URLs by / and then the name of the folder they are in, if they are not at the absolute root of the server. It depends on your setup.
If you want paths that will work regardless of the server root, it's best to use a relative path or use a constant that can easily be changed depending on the configuration.
Example :
define("PATH", "/");
Link that always work
You will only have one line to change to make your paths work all the time with a different configuration - relative paths can be tricky to deal with when working in deep sub-folders.
Furthermore, if you want to see where it's actually looking for the file, open the Console in your web browser of choice, they should display the error (404 most likely) and the path it's looking at.

css image path with version for CDN

I'm working with the following paradigm for handling my CDN caching:
Each path contains "?version", for example: http://mycdn.com/some-javascript-file.js?123
The same paradigm is used for all of my resources (js, css, images), the problem I'm encountering is images paths in a css file.
For example, I have the following snippet in one of my css's:
"url (../../Images/example.png)"
The problem is that this image path doesn't use the version paradigm, I would like to add the version to the path somehow, is there a nice way to do this, except of the following methods:
1) For each image change - also change the css with some dummy version.
"url (../../Images/example.png?1)" - change 1
"url (../../Images/example.png?55)" - change 2
2) Transfer all of my css's files to be aspx files and to use the code-behind in order to define the version:
"<%= html.VersionUrl("../../Images/example.png")%>"
3) Use dotless lib: http://www.dotlesscss.org/
Any other simple/nice idea?
The best solution which I've found was to change the version tag to be at the beginning of the url and to use url rewrite in order to process the requests.
So if for example I used to had:
http://website/Content/Images/1.png?123456
this will become to:
http://website/123456/Content/Images/1.png
Notice that I use url rewrite in order the process the request so that http://website/123456/Content/Images/1.png will actually bring the data from http://website/Content/Images/1.png

Is there a tool to check CSS url files exist?

I've just been tasked with migrating a website from a Windows server to a Linux server.
One of the issues I've noticed straight away is that there are a number of CSS url() definitions that don't work because the case in the CSS is not the same as the actual file.
eg:
background: url(myFile.jpg);
while on the server the file is actually MyFile.jpg.
Does anyone know of a simple tool or browser plugin I can use just to scan the CSS file and verify that the url() declarations exist so that I can easily find and fix them?
The site is quite large, so I don't want to have to navigate through the pages to find 404 errors if I can avoid it.
Use Developer Tools in Google Chrome or Firebug in Firefox.
When you load HTML page with that CSS, it will show any missing resources in Network tab.
EDIT
I guess there is no any tool that will
Scan through CSS file for all the URLs
Check whether each URL exists or not.
But you can try following two links for these two tasks.
RegEx to get the URLs from CSS : With this you will have all list of URLs used in CSS
Check if a URL exists or not with cURL : An example in PHP was given.
You can still search for these two items separately and try fixing the issues.
Let me know if this helps.
What, if you simply write a http request into browser's URL bar pointing directly to the image and/or css?
How about firebug in firefox? It would give you all 404 in its console.
download
You can install Firebug if you're using Firefox or you can press F12 if you're using Chrome.. i think that goes the same with IE.. From there you will be able to check the URL and even view it in a new tab.
Turns out that the W3c Link Checker also scans CSS files which is very handy.
Had this have not worked I would have had to put together something like Vanga's solution.
Here's how I would approach this.
Make sure all image requests are handled by a (PHP) script, by adding the following to my .htaccess
RewriteRule .(?:jpe?g|gif|png|bmp)$ /images.php [NC,L]
Use file_exists() to check if the file exists, maybe even try if a lowercase version of the file exists.
Log missing files into a database table or text file.
Use a script to loop through the website's sitemap with curl to get a complete list of requested filenames that resulted in a 404.

Loading multiple CSS files with single http request

When I view the source code of yahoo mail, I see multiple css files in a link tag using an & symbol as shown below:
href="http://mail.yimg.com/zz/combo?kx/ucs/uh/css/271/yunivhead-min.css&kx/ucs/uh/css/221/logo-min.css&kx/ucs/avatar/css/17/avatar-min.css"
Does anyone know, how they separate each file and load them all using a single http request?
In this case, there seems to be a script that joins the css files into a single response.
The path to the script is http://mail.yimg.com/zz/combo. It accepts several parameters containing paths to CSS files, which will then be joined and possibly minified.
If you play around with the URL, you can see that you could remove the -min-Prefixes from the URL and you get the unminified CSS file in return: http://mail.yimg.com/zz/combo?kx/ucs/uh/css/271/yunivhead.css&kx/ucs/uh/css/221/logo.css&kx/ucs/avatar/css/17/avatar.css
There are several CSS minifiers around, for example CSSmin. But as this is a Yahoo page, they probably use their own CSS compressor, YUI. For details about how it works, see http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/#work.
Not familiar with the specifics, but the URL looks like a query string with the CSS files as unnamed parameters.
http://mail.yimg.com/zz/combo will be a service that loads the CSS, then concatenates and probably minifies the files before serving back to the client.
My guess is that http://mail.yimg.com/zz/combo is a small program / script which collects all params (like kx/ucs/uh/css/271/yunivhead-min.css, kx/ucs/uh/css/221/logo-min.css, kx/ucs/avatar/css/17/avatar-min.css), bundles them and minimizes them.
This is similar to the bundling feature for MVC, which you can read about at http://www.davidhayden.me/blog/asp.net-mvc-4-bundling-and-minification (or other sources).
If you take the URL apart what you see is that it's a request to something called "combo" passing in various querystring keys (note there's no values) that are the paths to some CSS files.
These keys will then be extracted in the standard way given the server side language being used and the CSS for that url parsed into a variable before being returned in its entirety to the response.
For their yui project, yahoo development have a project called yuiloader. While designed primarily for yui, the code seems like it can be set up to serve other files as well. This does more than COMBO. it also works out dependancies. with JS and CSS.
As Yahoo is the Y in YUI, this is probably their code base for mail.yimg.com.
The code can be found on https://github.com/yui/phploader.

Google Fonts CSS Include

Hey,
Since Google Fonts came out, I have had this question in mind. First see this below:
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cantarell&subset=latin' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
Here Google is linking to an external CSS file that doesn't have a file extension (.css)! Then Google also has another feature that if you want to inlude another font to this then just add the "|" sign and type the font name. How do you do this? Using Javascript, PHP or something?
Help is appreciated!
Thanks :)
The extension of a file does not have to mean anything at all about the contents of said file. It is merely a convention (one that Windows, for instance, uses to the point of making it seem like a requirement).
Any dynamic 'file' on a web site can return what ever kind of content it wants, any time it wants. The extension means nothing - aside from expected convention.
That URL could be a directory named css with a default 'document' that is a script, which handles the parameters to decide what content to give. Or, it could be a literal file named css which does the same thing. Or, it could not be a file or folder at all, instead merely part of a routing mechanism, which calls a controller based on the URL, and passes the parameters in.
Web servers return information in the response indicating what the MIME Type of the return value is, and the browser determines what to do with it based on that - not based on the extension of the file.
Yes, they have to be doing some sort of server-side processing when this URL is requested
http://fonts.googleapis.com/css
The querystring is parsed, and a text stream is returned with the CSS output. Allowing the user to add additional font families to the CSS is pretty trivial, as the server is just spitting back what you append to the query string.
You could do this in PHP or ASP.Net (and many others), but there is no indication of the underlying technology from Google's URL.
The easiest way to do this yourself would be to create a folder on your web server called "css", and then have a default script in there that does the processing. The URL could basically be almost identical to the Google url.

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