[Proposal][Tested] Add a URL scheme forcing Parcel to not process paths

[GeeekyBoy]

Motivation

Sometimes, it's useful to include external resources which are located on the same server but not actually part of the project. For example, a stylesheet is located at https://example.com/styles.css and you want to include it in your website at https://example.com/my-project/. The normal way to do this is to use an absolute path, e.g. <link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles.css">. However, this doesn't work with Parcel, because it will try to resolve the path relative to the project root while bundling.

Proposed solution

Add a URL scheme which forces Parcel to not process the path. For example, the path in <link rel="stylesheet" href="ignore:/styles.css"> would not be processed by Parcel, and the browser would request the file directly from the server. In other words, the block of code above will be transformed to <link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles.css"> in the output without any processing of the linked file.

Example

<link rel="stylesheet" href="ignore:/styles.css">

is transformed to

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles.css">

Implementation

The implementation should be fairly simple. It only requires 4 lines of code. I've already implemented it and tested it locally, and it works as expected. I'll submit a PR soon once I've got a feedback from the maintainers.

Related issues

• [RFC] A way to include stylesheets/scripts in html without bundling them #1087
• Ignore certain link targets in HTML href #1186