"I'm sad about this change ... from the perspective of someone who really likes small independent sites"
Honestly, this is for the best. jQuery and other JS/CSS CDNs need to go away. They never (ever) made good on their promise: using them doesn't really increase the hitrate of those resources. This is true for a few reasons:
1. Fragmentation. There are so many versions of the common libraries -- and variations of those versions -- that it's unlikely that a visitor to your site has loaded your particular reference resource from another site.
2. Local cache is surprisingly ineffectual for users that don't show up to your site regularly. Browsers have gotten really... (read more)
"I'm sad about this change ... from the perspective of someone who really likes small independent sites"
Honestly, this is for the best. jQuery and other JS/CSS CDNs need to go away. They never (ever) made good on their promise: using them doesn't really increase the hitrate of those resources. This is true for a few reasons:
1. Fragmentation. There are so many versions of the common libraries -- and variations of those versions -- that it's unlikely that a visitor to your site has loaded your particular reference resource from another site.
2. Local cache is surprisingly ineffectual for users that don't show up to your site regularly. Browsers have gotten really... (read more)