Lazy Load Resources Based on Element Presence

By  on  

Fans of AMD JavaScript will probably tell you that they love loading only what they need, when they need them.  I am one of those people.  Let's take a site like mine for example: some pages require a syntax highlighter, some do not.  Why make the effort to load the syntax highlighter CSS and JavaScript if there are no pre elements that would require it?

The following is an example of how I occasionally load resources based on DOM contents:

$('article pre').length && (function() {
        var mediaPath = '/assets/';

        $('').attr({
            type: 'text/css',
            rel: 'stylesheet',
            href: mediaPath + 'css/syntax.css'
        }).appendTo(document.head);

        var syntaxScript = document.createElement('script');
        syntaxScript.async = 'true';
        syntaxScript.src = mediaPath + 'js/syntax.js';
        document.body.appendChild(syntaxScript);
    })();

The arguments against this practice will be (1) concatenating into existing JS and CSS to save on the number of requests and (2) flash of content style changes.  The first argument needs to be judged on a per-case basis;  if the required CSS and JS is small, it should be concatenated to a file used throughout the site or site subsection.  The second argument can always be hushed with a bit of transition magic!

Recent Features

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

  • By
    Conquering Impostor Syndrome

    Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense.  I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions.  I've even caught myself reading the post...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Adding Events to Adding Events in MooTools

    Note: This post has been updated. One of my huge web peeves is when an element has click events attached to it but the element doesn't sport the "pointer" cursor. I mean how the hell is the user supposed to know they can/should click on...

  • By
    Animated AJAX Record Deletion Using jQuery

    I'm a huge fan of WordPress' method of individual article deletion. You click the delete link, the menu item animates red, and the item disappears. Here's how to achieve that functionality with jQuery JavaScript. The PHP - Content & Header The following snippet goes at the...

Discussion

  1. Really interesting and surprisingly simple, I need to look into this for an upcoming build, thanks for sharing.

  2. Does async make a difference when the script is being injected dynamically (like in the code above)? I thought it only applies on “pre-existing” script elements (i.e. scripts that appear in the HTML source of the page).

    • Hm, that question is quite old, but it looks like that async = true is not needed.

  3. The first argument is why I would concatenate this; the difference in load time for this particular functionality would be imperceptible and would ensure the functionality is available whether syntax highlighting is used down the page or on a separate one.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!