What are the pros and cons of adding <script> and <link> elements using JavaScript?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5302623

Question

Recently I saw some HTML with only a single <script> element in its <head>...

<head>
    <title>Example</title>
    <script src="script.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <link href="plain.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
</head>

This script.js then adds any other necessary <script> elements and <link> elements to the document using document.write(...): (or it could use document.createElement(...) etc)

document.write("<link href=\"javascript-enabled.css\" type=\"text/css\" rel=\"styleshet\" />");
document.write("<script src=\"https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.min.js\" type=\"text/javascript\"></script>");
document.write("<script src=\"https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.10/jquery-ui.min.js\" type=\"text/javascript\"></script>");
document.write("<link href=\"http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.7.0/themes/trontastic/jquery-ui.css\" type=\"text/css\" rel=\"stylesheet\" />")
document.write("<script src=\"validation.js\" type=\"text/css\"></script>")

Note that there is a plain.css CSS file in the document <head> and script.js just adds any and all CSS and JavaScript which would be used by a JS-enabled user agent.

What are some of the pros and cons of this technique?

Was it helpful?

Solution

The blocking nature of document.write

document.write will pause everything that the browser is working on the page (including parsing). It is highly recommended to avoid because of this blocking behavior. The browser has no way of knowing what you're going to shuff into the HTML text stream at that point, or whether the write will totally trash everything on the DOM tree, so it has to stop until you're finished.

Essentially, loading scrips this way will force the browser to stop parsing HTML. If your script is in-line, then the browser will also execute those scripts before it goes on. Therefore, as a side-note, it is always recommended that you defer loading scripts until after your page is parsed and you've shown a reasonable UI to the user.

If your scripts are loaded from separate files in the "src" attribute, then the scripts may not be consistently executed across all browsers.

Losing browser speed optimizations and predictability

This way, you lose a lot of the performance optimizations made by modern browsers. Also, when your scripts execute may be unpredictable.

For example, some browsers will execute the scripts right after you "write" them. In such cases, you lose parallel downloads of scripts (because the browser doesn't see the second script tag until it has downloaded and executed the first). You lose parallel downloads of scripts and stylesheets and other resources (many browsers can download resources, stylesheets and scripts all at the same time).

Some browsers defer the scripts until after the end to execute them.

The browser cannot continue to parse the HTML while document.write is going on and, in certain cases, when the scripts written are being executed due to the blocking behavior of document.write, so your page shows up much slower.

In other words, your site has just become as slow as it was loading on a decades-old browser with no optimizations.

Why would somebody do it like this?

The reason you may want to use something like this is usually for maintainability. For instance, you may have a huge site with thousands of pages, each loading the same set of scripts and stylesheets. However, when you add a script file, you don't want to edit thousands of HTML files to add the script tags. This is particularly troublesome when loading JavaScript libraries (e.g. Dojo or jQuery) -- you have to change each HTML page when you upgrade to the next version.

The problem is that JavaScript doesn't have an @include or @import statement for you to include other files.

Some solutions

The solution to this is probably not by injecting scripts via document.write, but by:

  1. Using @import directives in stylesheets
  2. Using a server scripting language (e.g. PHP) to manage your "master page" and to generate all other pages (however, if you can't use this and must maintain many HTML pages individually, this is not a solution)
  3. Avoid document.write, but load the JavaScript files via XHR, then eval() them -- this may have security concerns though
  4. Use a JavaScript Library (e.g. Dojo) that has module-loading features so that you can keep a master JS file which loads other files. You won't be able to avoid having to update the version numbers of the library file though...

OTHER TIPS

One major disadvantage is browser incompatibility. Not all browsers correctly fetch and incorporate the resources into the DOM, so it's risky to use this approach. This is more true of stylesheets than scripts.

Another issue is one of maintainability. Concatenating and writing strings to add DOM elements on the client'side can become a maintenance nightmare. It's better to use DOM methods such as createElement to semantically create elements.

One obvious advantage is that it makes conditional use of resources much easier. You can have logic that determines which resources to load, thereby reducing the bandwidth consumption and overall processing time for the page. I would use a library call such as jQuery $.getScript() to load scripts versus document.write. The advantage being that such an approach is cleaner and also allows you to have code executed when the request is completed or fails.

Well, I may as well throw my hat in the ring on this one...

If you examine google's closure library, base.js, you will see that document.write is used in their writeScriptTag_() function. This is an essential part of the dependency management system which 'closure' provides, and is an enormous advantage when creating a complicated, multi-file, library-base javascript application - it lets the file/code prerequisites determine loading order. We currently use this technique and have been having little trouble with it. TBH, we have not had a single issue with browser compatibility, and we test regularly on IE 6/7/8, FF3/2, Safari 4/5 and Chrome latest.

The only disadvantage that we have had so far is that it can be challenging to track down issues caused by loading a resource twice, or failing to load one at all. Since the act of loading resources is programmatic, it is subject to programmatic errors, and unlike adding the tags directly to the HTML, it can be hard to see what the exact loading order is. However, this issue can be largely overcome by using a library with some form of dependency management system such as closure, or dojo.

EDIT: I have made a few comments to this nature, but I thought it best to summarize in my answer: There are some problems with dojo.require() and jQuery.getScript() (both which ultimiately perform an ajax request and eval).

  1. loading via ajax means no cross scripting - ie no loading javascript that is not from your site. This will be a problem if you want to include https://ajax.googleapis.com as listed in the description.
  2. Eval'd scripts will not show up in a javascript debugger's list of page scripts, making debugging quite challenging. Recent releases of firebug will show you eval'd code, however filenames are lost making the act of setting breakpoints tedious. AFAIK, Webkit javascript console and IE8 developer tools do not show eval'd scripts.

It has the advantage that you don't need to repeat the script references in each HTML file. The disadvantage is that the browser must fetch and execute the main javascript file before it may load the others.

I guess one advantage I could think of would be if you use these scripts on multiple pages, you only have to remember to include one script, and it saves some space.

At Google PageSpeed, they highly discourage you from using this technique, because it makes things slower. Apart from the sequential loading of your script.js before all the others, there's another catch:

Modern browsers use speculative parsers to more efficiently discover external resources [...] Thus, using JavaScript's document.write() to fetch external resources makes it impossible for the speculative parser to discover those resources, which can delay the download, parsing, and rendering of those resources.

It's also possible that this was written as a recommendation by an SEO firm to make the head element shorter if possible, so unique content is closer to the top of the document - also creating a higher text-to-HTML ratio. Though it does sound, all-in-all, like not a very good way of doing this; though it would make maintenance more time-consuming, a better approach would probably be to condense javascript into a single .js file and css into a single .css file, if it were deemed utterly necessary to reduce head element size.

A great disadvantage is that adding scripts into head will pause the processing of the document until those scripts were completely downloaded parsed and executed (because the browser thinks they may use document.write). - This will hurt responsiveness.

Now days it is recommended that you put your script tags right befo </body>. Of course this is not possible 100% of times, but if you are using unobtrusve Javascript (as you should), all scripts can be respositioned at the end of the document.

HTML5 came up with the async attribute which suggests the browser only to execute the scripts after the main document has been loaded. This is the behaviour of script-inserted scripts in many browsers, but notin all of them.

I advise against using document.write at all costs. Even without it, this results in one extra request towards the server. (We like to inimze the number of requests, for example with css sprites.)

And yes, as others mentioned earlier, if scriping is disabled your page will be shown without CSS (which makes it potentially unusable).

  1. If JavaScript is disabled - <script> and <link> elements won't be added at all.

  2. If you place JavaScript init functions at the bottom of your page (which is a good practice) and link CSS with JavaScript, it may cause a some delay before CSS loads (broken layout will be visible for a short time).

Licensed under: CC-BY-SA with attribution
Not affiliated with StackOverflow
scroll top