Re: [OT] Testing race conditions in web pages

Hi, "a race condition between loading the page and loading its CSS" -- that doesn't make any sense to me. Even if the CSS is contained in an external file, it will be loaded as part of the page rendering by the browser, unless your friend is doing something very weird.

<html>
<head>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css">
</head>
<body>

<h1>Hello, world</h1>

</body>
</html>
[download]

Tell him only PHP has that problem ....

The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

Comment on Re: [OT] Testing race conditions in web pages Download Code

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Re^2: [OT] Testing race conditions in web pages by Corion (Patriarch) on Dec 04, 2018 at 14:11 UTC
I can easily imagine some dynamically generated CSS that depends on user settings. Getting a race condition in place in such a situation doesn't feel too far-fetched for me. Of course, you might consider dynamically generated CSS resources weird, but I don't think that that's a problem that would only occur with PHP.	[reply]
Re^3: [OT] Testing race conditions in web pages by 1nickt (Canon) on Dec 04, 2018 at 14:17 UTC
Well. True, I haven't encountered dynamically-generated CSS, and I do think it is a little weird, but I suppose there are uses for such a technique. I was just kidding about blaming PHP, though! (edit: I have certainly manipulated CSS using JS, after page load ... and Corion reminds me that this very site generates CSS dynamically at least part of the time.) The way forward always starts with a minimal test.	[reply]
Re^3: [OT] Testing race conditions in web pages by Jenda (Abbot) on Dec 05, 2018 at 14:07 UTC
Even if the CSS is indeed dynamically generated and user dependent, the race condition still makes no sense. Unless of course he's crazy enough to keep the URL of the CSS static and generate CSS for the last person that requested the page or something similarly insane. Jenda Enoch was right! Enjoy the last years of Rome.	[reply]
Re^4: [OT] Testing race conditions in web pages by Corion (Patriarch) on Dec 05, 2018 at 14:30 UTC
Well, not to claim that this is sane, but you could serve different CSS to different clients based on the cookie they request the URL with...	[reply]
Re^4: [OT] Testing race conditions in web pages by markong (Pilgrim) on Dec 05, 2018 at 16:31 UTC
Given the poor information the OP has shared, I think that the only way to interpret this "race condition" is that the friend is serving resource's URL(s) which maintain the whole request state consistent if they are hit in some defined consecutive and predictable order, which given the distributed nature of the HTTP protocol he should not assume.	[reply]