Hi James
what criticalpathcssgenerator does is (i think) strip out the critical elements that stop the page rendering and adds it back on the actual HTML page… it does this because everytime a page is displayed it finds an external styles sheet, waits for that response then download the data and then interprets it. I think the thinking is if you could move that into the HTML page itself then you wouldn’t need to call out so many times
to make the page render and in turn increase speed.
What these systems are trying to do is create faster-rendered pages. So with that in mind what we (as freeway users) are trying to do is either re-use styles so we don’t keep rewriting the same styles over and over again or add the critical CSS which will allow the page to render into the head.
What the class to id action can do is to convert an id style into a class style, which can be then reused a million times if required by items that share the same style attributes. If you then were able to write that into the Head (if it was a critical style) then it would accomplish what (i think) critical path generator does. So that’s the similarity… it’s style management.
The theory sounds geat but in reality, it isn’t as easy as that. For example what’s critical. Are we talking about 2 styles or 3 or are we talking about 20, 30, 40? Do we actually know what’s holding up the page from being rendered? If we make an adjustment on the page, does that have an effect on what’s critical?. You could come up with dozens of scenarios which could so to speak muddy the water.
Anyway that’s my take on it Max
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