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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools History Plugin

    One of the reasons I love AJAX technology so much is because it allows us to avoid unnecessary page loads.  Why download the header, footer, and other static data multiple times if that specific data never changes?  It's a waste of time, processing, and bandwidth.  Unfortunately...

  • By
    Unicode CSS Classes

    CSS class name structure and consistency is really important; some developers camelcase classnames, others use dashes, and others use underscores.  One thing I've learned when toying around by HTML and CSS class names is that you can actually use unicode symbols and icons as classnames.

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!