Internet Explorer, Only 31 Stylesheets includes interpreted - solution?

[Oli S]

Hi @ all

I researched an tried hours and hours to find the reason for a strange layout problem in internet explorer (version independent)

It's a knwon problem, that all current Internet Explorer interprete 31 Stylesheets includes.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/262161

Now I have the problem, that (depending of including plugins on my page) more the 31 Stylesheets are included.

Is there a solution from atlassian side available?

For example a systemwide batch = on option, to merge all css includes into one file?

is there annother solution / idea ro solve such a problem?

example:

beause the stylesheet for the toolbar of the editor is the last loaded css file, it lloks like this:

in the "edit page" area - it's correct.

i couldn't find a solution from my side, so I hope now, somebody of you have a solution.

cheers oli

[Brian Nguyen]

Hi,

The problem with IE and the limit on stylesheets is one we run into occasionally in our own local instances of Confluence. Unfortunately, there are a limited number of solutions.

• The recommended solution is to upgrade to Confluence 4.0 or higher, or Bamboo 3.4 or higher. These versions include an update to our plugins platform that allows us to batch resources together by context. This significantly reduces the number of stylesheets. Unfortunately, JIRA, Fisheye and Crucible do have this update as yet.
• Upgrade Internet Explorer to version 9. The CSS limit is only a problem in IE8 and below so if you are able to use a later version this will solve your problem as well.
• You can reduce the number of stylesheets downloaded by disabling plugins that you do not use. This can reduce the number of resources downloaded but I would only carry out this suggestion as a last resort.

Unfortunately, apart from these there is little a Confluence administrator can do to alleviate the problem. In general, the problem can only really be solved by a developer. If you have some custom plugins it may be beneficial to contact the developer(s).

Cheers,
Brian

[Oli S]

Hi Brian

Thank you for the detailed reply.

- I try to investigate to upgrade the confluence system.

Because the other solutions are not possible.

the confluence 3.5 isn't compatible with IE 9 (as I could see). In the editor (standarddesign, disabled all plugins) i receive several errors, comming from the tiny editor. (perhaps I create another thread about this problem)

disable plugins isn't possible too.

cheers

oli

[Oli S]

additional info: I use for my plugin the batch mode.

the over 31 css includes not comming from me..

[NielsJ]

Ah, I really love that ugly problem of the IE. It is so weird that nobody would ever think about a LIMIT of the number of parsed CSS files. Some years ago I also spent hours to track it down :-D

Anyway, there is a solution. You could use the batched mode[1] for your resources. Unfortunately that doesn't help you if you have 32 plugins with each defining its own resources. Then you would have to write a special plugin that batches all those CSS files and delivers them as one.

1: https://developer.atlassian.com/display/CONFDEV/Web+Resource+Module#WebResourceModule-BatchedMode

[Oli S]

Hi, I use the batch mode for my stuff.

from plugins are only 2 includes ;-)

the "collect styles" plugin sounds interesting, but havn't any start idea to develop such a thing

thank you for your input

[NielsJ]

Basically you grab all refernced CSS files, batch them together and provide them as one unified CSS. But in detail this could be very complicated (every page may reference other CSS files). Additionally you would have to remove the existing stylesheet links from the resulting HTML.

If you have an own Theme or use the default Theme you can just edit the main decorator. Throw out the other stuff and put your unified CSS file in. If this is not possible you could write a ServletFilter that does the job (HTML fiddling...)

The other point is how to collect the CSS files. You could try to do this by iterating over all plugins and collecting web resource modules etc. I think it is better to do this with a ServletFilter that

• finds all style links
• sub-requests all referenced styles (think about caching!)
• batch them together
• removes the original stylesheet liks
• put in your unified stylesheet link

That all is very vague and sounds like bad hack. Maybe it is better to ask Atlassian Support prior to that. Maybe they have a better solution :-)

[Oli S]

last night i thought about the problem and i found the "css-grabing" solution for me too.

but as you said: it's a holy shit to develop this, because "caching, never forget a resource, create a rest resource to receive the css". - because '<style>' will slow down the site.

what I couldn't understood is, that I couldn't find a proven solution by atlassian, because it's a common problem with a lot of plugin's and such a css include philosophy.

so my question here to atlassian:

what is your solution for this problem?

cheers oli

[NielsJ]

Maybe there is a solution on the other side - the IE. I've never checked, but there may be an extension that removes this limit of IE. If you do not want to roll out such an extension for a thousand workstations that could also work.

Maybe you could also try a partial solution. You could grab a number of static styles from some of the plugins and build them into one plugin that batches them. Then you could disable the other plugin's web resource modules. So you could "win" some stylesheets and get under the limit...

[Oli S]

The last input is a funny idea ;-)

I created a support ticket at atlassian support, with this question. I'm really interested in what they say.

thank you for your big feedback and your support. if I have solution found, wich works, I'll give feedback.

if there is no usefull input from atlassian support, I'll develop an explained solution.