xsl

Quick trick to disable Autoptimize on a page

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Update 2021: no need for below “hack” anymore; you can configure Autoptimize on a per-page basis on the post/ page edit screen! See this blogpost on the metabox settings for some more info.

So suppose you have one page/ post which for whatever reason you don’t want Autoptimize to act on? Simply add this in the post content and AO will bail out;

Some extra info:

  • Make sure to use the “text”-editor, not the “visual” one as I did here to make sure the ode is escaped and thus visible
  • This bailing out was added 5 years ago to stop the PHP-generated xsl:stylesheet from Yoast SEO from being autoptmized, if I’m not mistaking Yoast generates the stylesheet differently now.
  • The xsl-tag is enclosed in a HTML comment wrapper to ensure it is not visible (except here, on purpose to escape the HTML tags so they are visible for you to see).

Blank Yoast SEO sitemaps no more!

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yoast_thumbsIf you’re using both Autoptimize and WordPress SEO by Yoast, you might have noticed blank sitemaps in your browser. With the help of Vance Hallman and Armand Hadife, I have been able to isolate and fix this rather interesting bug.
I pretty soon saw that It actually wasn’t the sitemap XML, but the XSL (XML stylesheets, browsers use those to make XML readable) that was wrecking havoc. This means that although you couldn’t see them in your browser, the sitemaps themselves were not broken and could still be used by search engines.
But then why was the XSL broken? Well, Yoast’s WordPress SEO generates the sitemap XML and XSL on the fly, hooking into WordPress’ template_redirect action, according to the source-code to “Hijack requests for potential sitemaps and XSL files”. Autoptimize hooks into the same action, finds JavaScript in the XSL (jQuery tablesorter actually) to optimize, and injects the minimized script with a boolean defer-attribute back in the HTML. The problem; it’s not HTML, it’s XSL with HTML in it. And a defer attribute on a script-tag is not valid XML, so the XSL does not validate so the browser can not render the sitemap, resulting in the blank page you might have seen.
Although fiddling with the defer-attribute could solve the issue, I think it’s not a good idea for Autoptimize to try to optimize non-HTML resources as it isn’t WordPress’ core functionality either, so I changed Autoptimize to not act on non-HTML content (i.e. without an HTML-tag or with an xsl:stylesheet-tag). This change is in the upcoming 1.7.3 release, it will be pushed live tomorrow.