I spent some more time this afternoon / evening reviewing the overall structure of the themes, and had a lightbulb moment in the sense that it could (and should) be leaner / quicker. The big mistake here is duplicating the CSS in each Swatch (note I’m using the word “Swatch” here because the “theme” is undergoing major refactoring) makes the initial loading slower than it really should be as the entire page has to be reloaded to remove the previous CSS classes.
From a design perspective, this didn’t make any sense the more I thought about it. So, off to Dev I went and began refactoring. The end result (in Dev at least) is that there is now one “common” CSS file that gets loaded once, and the “swatches” are just CSS variables (rather like mixins) where the existing ones are replaced with a new set on selection.
Instead of adding another large CSS file, and effectively increasing the load time, we now simply call around 15 mixins and inject these into the head with an Ajax request. This means the Swatch changes instantly, and the site no longer needs to be reloaded to clear out any odd looking artefacts.
Admittedly, this has now “broken” the daylight theme in the sense that I have to restructure it as it was experiential at the time, and something of a deviation in that the mixins used do not align properly as they do in the other swatches. This was more about attempting to achieve a specific look.
I succeeded on that front as per the previous post, but now have to rework it based on the changes I’ve made to the other swatches in order to streamline them. One thing I did take from the daylight Swatch is the user posting style (giving an illusion of threaded replies) that makes the overall reading experience better in my view - this is now sewn into all swatches meaning a consistent viewing experience throughout.
Tomorrow will hopefully allow me time to get the daylight Swatch working again. Once done and tested, I’ll implement it in production.
