There is one important reason why we use <link> instead of
<style>…</style>: when the rendered page HTML is cached, e.g. using a
caching proxy like Varnish [1] or MediaWiki file cache [2], then if we
used <style>…</style>, you would have to purge every page on the wiki
before changes to MediaWiki:Common.css would actually take effect,
because the CSS would be embedded in the cached HTML.
Using <link> means that it only takes as long as it takes the cached
resource to expire in the users' browsers. (By default, they are set to
expire after 5 minutes.)
If you don't have caching enabled, then of course that wouldn't matter –
but also, if you don't have caching enabled, then that is probably a
much worse performance problem than not embedding the styles :)
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Varnish_caching
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:File_cache
--
Bartosz Dziewoński
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
