Privacy plugin misbehave with query parameters in script-src about mkdocs-material

[alexvoss]

The privacy plugin downloads assets and stores them locally so that the browser does not access any third-party web server when the user views the page(s). As a result, there is nothing that would interpret the query parameter since the assets are loaded as they are from the hosting web server. I would say that this is the plugin working as intended. That is assuming it has followed the redirect mentioned in your example and stored the file that it actually resolved to?

I am not sure that trying to use the privacy plugin with Google Adsense makes a lot of, um, sense? Are you aiming to reduce the footprint of your site with the exception of that service?

[meysam81]

@alexvoss

I observed a great performance improvement when using privacy to download some of the external assets, especially on mobile devices (as measured by cloudflare and google pagespeed).

You're probably referring to the privacy exception, aren't you?

[alexvoss]

That is a side effect of the plugin's function - if the external hosting of the assets is slow. Normally, assets would sit on a CDN and that would improve the performance experienced by most users. For popular assets it would also help increase the chances that they are already cached by the browser. How many assets do you have where your own hosting is faster? It might make sense to manually integrate them into your site instead of asking the privacy plugin to do this?

I don't have much experience with the plugin and the exception clause. It does sound like what you would need to exclude Adsense code from being turned into local assets. Might be the way to go if there are too many assets to deal with manually - of if you want them to be downloaded afresh when you build.

Just looking at the options available, you can also combine the exclude statement with an include one if you want to use the plugin to only download assets from a specific site.

Do let us know if anything is not working. Note that the privacy plugin is marked as experimental.

[squidfunk]

The url query parameter is missing and for external services, that results to unintended behavior.

@alexvoss is right – the plugin is working as intended:

The privacy plugin downloads assets and stores them locally so that the browser does not access any third-party web server when the user views the page(s). As a result, there is nothing that would interpret the query parameter since the assets are loaded as they are from the hosting web server.

In order to create discernible URLs for different query parameters, the privacy plugin coerces them to a hash, since query parameters are not evaluated for self-hosted assets (an assumption by the plugin):

mkdocs-material/src/plugins/privacy/plugin.py

Lines 501 to 509 in 5458039

	# Compute digest of query string, as some URLs yield different results
	# for different query strings, e.g. https://unsplash.com/random?Coffee
	if url.query:
	name, extension = posixpath.splitext(path)
	# Inject digest after file name and before file extension, as
	# done for style sheet and script files as well
	digest = sha1(url.query.encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()[:8]
	path = f"{name}.{digest}{extension}"

You can use assets_exclude to instruct the privacy plugin to not process the URL, in order to resolve this issue by a simple configuration change:

plugins:
  - privacy:
      assets_exclude: 
        - httpbin.org/*

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Additionally, next time, please provide a self-contained minimal reproduction. It is mandatory. With a project of this size, we need to be efficient – we just cannot invest time to keep contents of files stored in different places around. Thank you!