Shopify: Can't load external stylesheet from another server - css

https://friends-with-you.myshopify.com/
I'm trying to develop my first shopify theme. I'm trying to load a stylesheet which is hosted on another server, but the CSS is not loading. If I copy and paste that CSS directly into a file in the shopify theme, it works.
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://fwy.pagodabox.com/magic/themes/fwy/fwy.css" />
What am I doing wrong at the above URL, and why isn't the css loading?
thanks!

Can you load your CSS file over both http and https? If so, change your tag to look like this:
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="//fwy.pagodabox.com/magic/themes/fwy/fwy.css" />
That way whether a user visits using http://yourstore.com or https://yourstore.com, they'll get the stylesheet served using the protocol they're on (and you won't get any mixed content warnings).
A little more background: http://paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/
Under IE7 and IE8, using this in a <link> tag will result in your content being fetched twice.

Change your link tag to use a secure URL:
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="https://fwy.pagodabox.com/magic/themes/fwy/fwy.css" />
^
The URL you're using now works fine on its own, but since you're browsing to the Shopify store over SSL, many web browsers are going to be hesitant to load the CSS over an unsecured connection.
I just checked and pagodabox serves the CSS file just fine over SSL.

In normal HTML documents one can load stylesheets from anywhere, as long as they exist and you're able to load them by typing the URL in (which I can).
I see the page as two navigation bars with a logo on the left hand side. There are hover states with transitions to a colour background on each item. Although, when I loaded the page, Chrome warned me not to load supposedly insecure content. Before this is loaded I just see text in Times New Roman. I think this is you problem.
I use themes with WordPress and style-sheets come with them (mostly). I don't see why you couldn't just put the style-sheet in with the rest of the theme.
Overall, the answer is yes (normally) but in this case browsers may regard it as un-safe and therefore not load it.

Yes you can! But it is faster to host the stylesheet on your server/where the other files reside. If you plan to include a stylesheet from elsewhere, you could run into problems of that server being down/busy and hence your theme will not display as required. As #Blieque mentioned, some browsers may question external content causing unnecessary warning popups to a user/user-agent.

Related

Render blocking and CSS

I imagine this has been asked time and time again, but i've not seen the answer I'm looking for.
Im doing some simple tests with a HTML file and CSS file trying to stop the page from render blocking the CSS, running the site through page insights ( google )
Now i've seen answers like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.20180530.css?ver=1.0" media="none" onload="if(media!='all')media='all'">
and I've seen answers like this:
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:300,700" rel="preload" onload="this.rel='stylesheet';this.removeAttribute('onload');" as="style">
Both of which I am fine with, for the google fonts! But not for the main styles of the page, I don't think its a good user experience to see a page with no styles and then all of a sudden they load in.
Obviously you can eliminate any blocking of CSS by sticking the whole lot as inline styles, but again I don't think this is good practice, you're outputting all styles to a HTML page and not loading them via a style sheet.
I've seen sites actually load the styles like so:
<link rel='stylesheet' id='main-css' href='./style.2018052108.css?ver=4.9' type='text/css' media='all' />
Heres a link to the page insight speed test on the. I know the site is running wordpress. If you view page source it uses the exact same as i've used above.
And they aren't Render Blocking at all... How?
Im on a https I'm using cloudflare and my style sheet is compressed and only around 24bytes and I'm still getting render blocking.
Why?
How to avoid it?
The CSS loaded as an external request is always render blocking, you can't avoid it. The recommendation on pagespeed insights is that you don't do any css request before the content is loaded, in order to avoid the unstyled effect they suggest that you inline the CSS needed to display the content before the fold.
The page on your example is doing exactly that, they inline some css content (check the source code and search for the style tag), then, when the content is loaded they add an external stylesheet with javascript.
All that said, this is a recommendation, you can ignore it if you are happy with the performance of your page, if you want to follow the recommendation you can apply some techniques to achieve this in an automation way.
As always, in css-tricks you have a great introduction post to these techniques: https://css-tricks.com/authoring-critical-fold-css/
The key to the Google PageSpeed insights is above-the-fold render blocking. If you check the site that you linked as your page speed test reference, there are no strictly inline styles - you are correct. However, they have a <style>...</style> block inside of their <head> that sets all of their most important styles for above-the-fold content. That means those styles render immediately, and all other supporting styles will load soon after - but your visitors (and Google PageSpeed) will not notice the difference.

How to Prevent Browsers from Caching CSS Files?

When I make a page, link it to a CSS file, and open it in a browser, it works fine.
But if a make a change and refresh the page again between very short time periods, the change is not reflected. But after sometime, when i refresh the page again, the changes appear.
So, somehow the browser keeps the CSS file cached and expires it after sometime. How to make the browser cache no CSS or HTML file.
It would be better if i can block it on a particular domain.
I'm on Ubuntu, using Chrome and Firefox, trying to prevent browsers from caching CSS files on 'localhost'... How to do it...
Thanks...
Something as simple as this should work:
<link rel="stylesheet" src="/css/screen.css?v={CURRENT_TIMESTAMP}">
Just replace {CURRENT_TIMESTAMP} with the actual timestamp in your server side code. This makes the browser think it's a new file because of the query string and it will be downloaded again. You could also use the actual modification time of the file (filemtime('/path/to/css/screen.css') if you're using PHP) which should prevent unnecessary downloads.
You can open Developer Tools by pressing Ctrl+Shift+J and then you'll find a cog icon in bottom right. When you click on it you should see an option to disable caching.
It would help to know how the website is hosted, as you can configure this in most web servers.
Also, it's a good idea to introduce a cache busting mechanism which would modify the links to the CSS files in question when you change the CSS files' contents. Browsers would then reload the CSS file because the HTML refers to a different URL.
A good example of a cache busting mechanism is the ruby on rails 3.1 asset pipeline which also minifies files and gzips them if the browser supports them:
Rails 3 - Asset Pipeline -- What does it mean to me?
http://2beards.net/2011/11/the-rails-3-asset-pipeline-in-about-5-minutes/
The seemingly-inelegant but rock solid approach is to give the asset a new name, when the content changes. This solves the problem for all your users, not just you:
<link rel="stylesheet" src="/css/screen_034.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" src="/css/screen_035.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" src="/css/screen_036.css">
Or maybe (but it's more of a pain to change in an IDE, and sometimes causes unrelated problems with caching):
<link rel="stylesheet" src="/css/screen.css?pretend_version_number=034">
Nothing else works quite as well in large scale production environments, where millions of copies of an older css file may be sitting in various intermediate or browser caches. Some clients ignore cache control headers, and you don't really want caching subverted anyway, at least not in production.
In development you can press Ctrl+Shift+J (Chrome) and turn off caching.

HTTPS and how to reference files and images

How should I reference my css file (which is in the non-secure area) from a webpage in the secure area. I've considered duplicating it (moving one in to the secure area) but this seems very inefficient.
Any advice much appreciated.
(p.s. there will most likely be a few follow up questions ha ha)
You can always avoid the issue by using a relative/rooted path:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/screen.css">
If you must use a full URL, I'm not sure why you can't use the https protocol (which is the correct solution), but there's one more option: don't specify a protocol at all.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//example.com/css/screen.css">
http://paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/
If the browser is viewing that current page in through HTTPS, then it'll request that asset with the HTTPS protocol, otherwise it'll typically* request it with HTTP. This prevents that awful "This Page Contains Both Secure and Non-Secure Items" error message in IE, keeping all your asset requests within the same protocol.
However:
Caveat: When used on a <link> or #import for a stylesheet, IE7 and IE8 download the file twice. All other uses, however, are just fine.
So if you must specify a full URL, the best/proper way is this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://example.com/css/screen.css">
There's really no alternative. Relative paths to images and resources in the CSS file itself should work just fine with either approach, and won't trigger the security error. If you need absolute URLs in the CSS file, then you can use the same trick.

css file not getting updated

the font of the content of my facebook app keeps getting italicized even when i've removed the italics from the css file. if i make minor changes in the css file and upload it to the server, the firebug shows the unedited previous css file and hence, the app keeps showing unformatted content. what exactly is going wrong here?
i made a new css file and copied the contents of the previous css exactly as it was, and i linked it in all the files which require css. but when i upload these files to the server, facebook canvas doesn't show any css at all. i replaced the css filename with the previous one, and it works. why is this?
Actually it looks like facebook is currently experiencing some weird problems with styling. It doesn't cache any new styles, only displays what was previously cached (from yesterday). If you provide a new stylesheet url it will not be able to pull it up (like that url doesn't exist).
During normal conditions what others already suggested should work.
Facebook does like to cache things. Persistently. I don't know why the new file wouldn't have worked, by I can recommend 'spoofing' your css filename with a spurious querystring variable, and incrementing it each time you make an update.
eg
href="my_css_file.css?x=1"
Sounds like the browser is caching your CSS file, which is why even Firebug sees the older version.
There are numerous ways you can prevent the browser from caching your CSS file during development (once in production mode, you probably want it to remain in the cache). The most common technique used by web frameworks like Ruby on Rails is to append a random query string to the URL, like so:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css?96234987" />
...but the trick is that it should be different every time, so the browser thinks it's a different file.
Here are links to a simple trick for PHP, a JSP example, and other possible methods.
According to Include files on facebook developer wiki:
Stylesheet includes are cached automatically by Facebook. Just include a tag like:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen"
href="http://yourapp.com/stylesheets/style.css?v=1.0" />
Increment the version number upon each change to your style sheet, as specified above.

How do tools like the web dev toolbar get the entire css file of a site?

The web dev toolbar for Firefox is quite an impressive tool.
What I am completely clueless about is how does this tool get the css stylesheet file of a site? This is hosted on a host which is secure etc. I am completely stumped.
I must be thinking about this in all the wrong way.
Thanks
The client (in this case Firefox) has to download the CSS file in order to render the page correctly. The plugin (in this case Firebug) simply requests the proper URL and the browser it gets it--most likely from the cache. There is no real mystery here.
In every HTML file, there's a link to the CSS stylesheet, or else the browser wouldn't know where to find it, thus losing the ability to render the page correctly.
It's in the form of <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="theme.css">,
I'd like to add that regardless of whether the host is 'secure' or not, it still is presenting the file to the client.
Unless, of course, you're looking at a XML file. Then you need to consult the XSL which'll tell you where the stylesheet is.

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