Order of Files Search

Sitepoint Members,
Is the order that the files are looked for in the rendering of a website

  1. CSS
  2. All files embeded in the css
  3. web pages
  4. images

Thanks,

Chris

It depends on your hosting account. Cheaper accounts (on shared hosting) will probably not allow that you increase the limit. You should contact your host to ask about your options.

C. A.,
Can a programmer with a site on a webhost set the setting you’re talking about?

Thanks,

Chris

Stevie D,
I’m aware of the parallel downloading, but pagetest.org has their “waterfall” graph and it appears the files of a web page really aren’t downloaded simultaneously. What do you think? Maybe I’m missing a piece of code.

Chris

If the maximum number of files that can be downloaded simultaneously is set to one, that will prevent parallel downloads.

The page starts to load first.

All other items - CSS, scripts and images, start to download when the call for them is loaded in the main page. These then download in parallel (although there may be a limit on the number of files that can be downloaded simultaneously), except for scripts - once a script starts downloading, everything else goes on hold until it’s done. (That’s why it’s generally best to put script calls at the end of the <body>, so that it doesn’t stall the page load for everything else)

I’m sorry, but I simply don’t understand what you mean.

C. A.,

Source code?

Thanks

Generally speaking, they are looked up in the order they are listed in the source. If the files are requested from several different servers, however, server file limits might alter this.