I am planning on using Google to download the jQuery lib for both UI and Core. My question is, do they allow me to download the CSS for it or should I have to host it myself?
Also if I use Google to load how should I load other plugins? Can I compress all plugins together or should it be its own separate file?
The Google AJAX Libraries API, which includes jQuery UI (currently v1.10.3), also includes popular themes as per the jQuery UI blog:
Google Ajax Libraries API (CDN)
Uncompressed: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.10.3/jquery-ui.js
Compressed: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.10.3/jquery-ui.min.js
Themes Uncompressed: black-tie, blitzer, cupertino, dark-hive, dot-luv, eggplant, excite-bike, flick, hot-sneaks, humanity, le-frog, mint-choc, overcast,pepper-grinder, redmond, smoothness, south-street, start, sunny, swanky-purse, trontastic, ui-darkness, ui-lightness, and vader.
Themes Compressed: black-tie, blitzer, cupertino, dark-hive, dot-luv, eggplant, excite-bike, flick, hot-sneaks, humanity, le-frog, mint-choc, overcast,pepper-grinder, redmond, smoothness, south-street, start, sunny, swanky-purse, trontastic, ui-darkness, ui-lightness, and vader.
Google is hosting jQueryUI css at this link https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8/themes/base/jquery.ui.all.css
If you look at this code directly, it is importing the css using @import which can be slow. You may want to factor the import into its parts to gain a slight performance benefit:
https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8/themes/base/jquery.ui.base.css https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8/themes/base/jquery.ui.theme.css
I would think so. Why not? Wouldn't be much of a CDN w/o offering the CSS to support the script files
This link suggests that they are:
We find it particularly exciting that the jQuery UI CSS themes are now hosted on Google's Ajax Libraries CDN.
