Comments on: Does setTimeout solve the DOMContentLoaded problem?

By: Diego Perini

Diego Perini — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:09:41 +0000

If you are looking for an alternative method to attach functionality earlier to a page look here:

http://javascript.nwbox.com/NWEvents/

The interesting part are the Delegates example. I know, no documentation yet but will do soon, since this is now well tested.

The code is published since mid 2007 under MIT license at:

http://nwevents.googlecode.com/

My syntax for that delegation task is:

NW.appendDelegate( selector, event_type, function, [delegate] );

Where:

selector - a full CSS3 selector string
event_type - the event type you whish to listen to
function - the user function handler
delegate - the delegate object (optional)

If the optional delegate object is passed in at the time of registration that element is used as the delegate, elsewhere the default “document.documentElement” is used to listen for that event type to bubble; at that time if the element match the selector the user function handler is executed.

This method is the all new method to avoid using an “onload” notification or similar “DOMReady” techniques.

It is a bit hard to grasp at first, but then you will realize we have always had the solution in front of us but we never saw it.

Diego Perini

By: Javascript News » Blog Archive » Using setTimeout to Solve DOMContentLoaded?

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:40:32 +0000

[...] He then thought, does setTimeout solve the DOMContentLoaded problem?. [...]

By: Scott Schiller

Scott Schiller — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:22:03 +0000

Interesting approach; I’ve read of a few similar techniques (Hedger Wang and Dean Edwards of course, have spent time looking into the onload issue) - I suspect having a single timeout could be susceptible to timing issues, particularly over slower connections; my habit is to just throw a single script block at the very bottom of the document which calls an init() function. The key at that point is the whole DOM should have been parsed by the time that script block is executed. While less-than-ideal having an inline script block, it has been consistent across all browsers.

By: Ajax Girl » Blog Archive » Using setTimeout to Solve DOMContentLoaded?

Ajax Girl » Blog Archive » Using setTimeout to Solve DOMContentLoaded? — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:17:42 +0000

[...] He then thought, does setTimeout solve the DOMContentLoaded problem?. [...]

By: Stuart Colville

Stuart Colville — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 10:44:20 +0000

@Jonathan: thanks for taking the time to put together your analysis. I think you’ve nailed it exactly and your thoughts around Gzipping certainly adds an interesting dimension to it cheers for taking it a step further.

By: Bramus!

Bramus! — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 08:59:17 +0000

(crossposted at Snook)

Heh, this is something I’ve used before. Didn’t know it was that big of an issue; thought it was my IE flipping out once more…

By: Jonathan Snook

Jonathan Snook — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 03:19:33 +0000

I was originally going to respond to this as a comment but expanded on my thoughts in a blog post. Conclusion: this *may* work depending on the ability to rely on Gzip compression.

By: Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 03:01:07 +0000

Nice implementation. I resorted to using setTimeout recently, to solve Safari inaccurately firing onload for iframes…

http://sonspring.com/journal/jquery-iframe-sizing

I did feel a bit dirty, but it got the job done. Glad to hear I’m not the only one who has tried it, with some measure of success.