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
    Introducing MooTools HeatMap

    It's often interesting to think about where on a given element, whether it be the page, an image, or a static DIV, your users are clicking.  With that curiosity in mind, I've created HeatMap: a MooTools class that allows you to detect, load, save, and...

  • By
    Drag and Drop MooTools File Uploads

    Honesty hour confession:  file uploading within the web browser sucks.  It just does.  Like the ugly SELECT element, the file input is almost unstylable and looks different on different platforms.  Add to those criticism the fact that we're all used to drag and drop operations...

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!