> I'd expect in-lining the css to be a slight net loss once the data is cached
I expected that too but it didn't work out that way. I'm not sure why, possibly a cache lookup is still slower than reading the style info out of the same page. I don't know enough about the guts of a modern browser to make the call but the numbers aren't there.
In chrome, I'm getting extremely similar times for the two approaches without caching (I am in-network, so my roundtrips are ~1ms). With the style.css fully cached, I'm getting ~15ms faster on the sideband approach than with inline styles.
Can you expose your methodology, or are you using a common tool for testing these things?
It looks like inline performs better on firefox and not on chrome - I just made a bunch of attempts both ways, and I'm seeing cached sideband as significantly better on Chrome, and only roughly equal on firefox.
I was not expecting to see such a difference between the two browsers, but I'm not familiar enough with firefox to guess what's causing it :-\
I'd expect in-lining the css to be a slight net loss once the data is cached - my strategy would be a `style-<md5sum>.css` with a long max-age.
I wish browsers could cache page fragments!