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
    6 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefox OS

    Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason:  Mozilla's finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they've been creating them for years -- with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.  Firefox OS has been rapidly improving...

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    jQuery Random Link Color Animations

    We all know that we can set a link's :hover color, but what if we want to add a bit more dynamism and flair? jQuery allows you to not only animate to a specified color, but also allows you to animate to a random color. The...

  • 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...

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!