I am working on a simple Cordova app with about 4 page types and I am trying to think through which is the better way to handle the inner HTML templates.
Hidden HTML hard coded into the HTML files that is hidden and populated/revealed by my JS.
Using a JS template system and appending and removing from the DOM.
I feel that appending all that to the DOM for a page is inefficient when I could just update the sections that change. But perhaps an append is lightweight enough where I shouldn't worry about it.
There are a number of ways you can do it. In terms of load on the browser. That is hard to say. From your question it is hard to know what is in these pages, what are you displaying, is it live data, static html etc.
When you first plot out an app, if you are from the old class of building multiple page websites, it can be a little concerning as to how well your app/page will run with all those pages crammed in to one, and all that data plus code.
The answer is, amazingly well. If done properly in modern browsers, and for example Ipads the app will run to near native performance.
The options you have are
Map all the pages into one HTML document. Hide each page content using css display:none, flip them into view using css animation, fading or just display:block.
Use a javascript routing library to map urls to blocks of code that deal with each page, this makes mapping out your app much easier, and means that buttons can just link to your pages, like a real website. see http://projects.jga.me/routie/
Building all the page templates into one page can make it hard to code, as the page becomes enormous, consider breaking the inner content of each page into separate files, you can then give each page holder a url and use a small xhr request to load the page on-the fly, once loaded you can cache it into memory or even local-storage, depending on whether you remove it when it is closed or keep it hidden.
In my experience you can put an enormous number or nodes into one page and have very little speed drop, bear in mind if you use something like jquery and do a lot of $(".page > .page1 > .items li") your going to have a slow app.
Tips
Use element ID's everywhere document.getElementById(..) is 100's of times faster in a loop that $(...)
cache elements when you find them, if you need them later store them in a memory cache.
keep for loop inner code to a minimum.
use a decent click touch libary like http://hammerjs.github.io/ and delegate all the events of the body tag or at least on each page.
If you need to touch the server, load data, think dom first, device second server later. A good app is a responsive app, that responds to the user instantly.
I know this has been posted a while ago, but for the sake of the users I am going to add my answer.
I completely agree with MartinWebb but my answer will shed some light on the results of his options. I am currently working on a similar project. Please note that this answer pertains to cordova (previously called phonegap) specifically. My app has about 5 pages with +-20 different components (input's, div's, h1's, p's, etc.). This is what i tried and the result of each:
jQuery was my first option, mainly because it is easy to use and reduces the amount of code required to accomplish a said goal. Result: First time I tried this approach I though I would spice it up with animations and transformations. The result of this was a very unresponsive app. I removed the animation and transformation, however due to the nature of my application I required multiple dynamically added components and jQuery just wasn't up for the task.
Css display:none and visible:hidden was my next option. I used javascript's dom to display certain div's. Result: This works if your not planning on switching many div shortly after one another eg. a simple menu. It quickly became apparent that this wasn't going to work. Also this does not eliminate my need for the dom. Remember document.getElementById('menu').style.display = "none"; is still part of the dom. This as a solution, for me, is poor. There is a reason that var menu= document.createElement('div'); is part of the language. Which brings me to my last option.
Building a page 90% on javascript's dom was my last option. Logically I could not see how 600 lines of code cold trump one .innerHTML or .style.display = "block"; but it did. Result: It was by far the most responsive of all the solutions.
I'm not saying that all webpages should be coded with dom appending, but as I stated previously, for a cordova app of a few pages (<6), with a few components a javascript dom appending approach would be best. It takes longer to code, but you will be rewarded with control and efficiency. I would suggest coding the backbone of your app in html and populating and controlling with javascript's dom.
Best of luck.
The first option, <div>s with display:none; would be more efficient by a small margin, but you can get the best of both worlds by compiling your JavaScript and templates together into a single file using something like browserify or require.js.
Related
It's been a long time since I last had to do any html, but one of the features that will apparently still work, but is not good practice, was to divide a page into frames and the you could use some sort of nav bar with all the page links to populate a targeted frame. eg.
clicky
I tried using the <iframe> tag, and although it's almost exactly what I want, I found it to be very frustrating to get it to autosize to the correct height depending on the content being loaded into it.
Obviously, I could just make an almost identical page but change the content on the new one and link from one to the other, but I have a rather nice css slideshow as my background for the site and I don't want it to reload every time a link is clicked!
Now, I'm loving stylesheets and divs, so is there any way to do the above without resorting to HTML 4? I'll take a javascript answer if there really is no way to do this in CSS and HTML 5.
Thanks in advance, you lovely people!
So, you just want to update the actual content, that differs? You could do it with iFrames, but this is not recommended at all.
The "new" way to use is called "AJAX"
It is a technique to download data from the server, without reloading the current page. This is done via JavaScript (and serverside PHP). That way you can update the page content only.
There are many tutorials on the web, also many common questions are answered on stackoverflow alreay. Feel free to check them out :)
For example, say you have an information box that will be repeated in every single page. if i have this in the HTML, then every time i change it, ill have to change it in every single HTML file.
But if i load it in the javascript (as in the whole thing), then I'll only need to change the javascript. For example,
$("body").append('<div id="infobox">*whatever i need*</div>')
is this a better way or does it create more complications?
or are there more efficient ways to do this?
In short, no. You're on a slippery path there…
It might be more efficient for the person maintaining the page but you should really be doing this on the server-side as mohkhan suggested e.g. through a CMS or pre-processing if you're site is completely static. I assume that on your site, there isn't just an info box that's repeated — what about the navigational elements, the banner etc.?
There's nothing wrong with loading elements through JavaScript (e.g. to show counters, data, etc.) but you shouldn't be doing it for core content. Remember too that you shouldn't assume that everyone will have JavaScript enabled.
I have a bug I'm trying to track down, and it is very difficult to do so because of the complexity of the web app. There are many frames, and many instances of Javascript code that is embedded into the HTML in different ways.
The thing that needs to be fixed is a sub-page created with showModalDialog (so you already know it's going to be a disaster), and I am hoping that I can find a way to serialize as much of the DOM as possible within this dialog page context, so that I may open it to the same content both when the bug is present and when it is not, in hopes of detecting missing/extra/different Javascript, which would become apparent by pumping the result through a diff.
I tried jQuery(document).children().html(). This gets a little bit of the way there (it's able to serialize one of the outer <script> tags!) but does not include the contents of the iframe (most of the page content is about 3 iframe/frame levels deep).
I do have a custom script which I'm very glad I made, as it's able to walk down into the frame hierarchy recursively, so I imagine I can use .html() in conjunction with that to obtain my "serialization" which I can then do some manual checking to see if it matches up with what the web inspector tells me.
Perhaps there exists some flag I can give to html() to get it to recurse into the iframes/frames?
The real question, though, is about how to get a dump of all the JS code that is loaded in this particular page context. Because of the significant server-side component of this situation, javascript resources can be entirely dynamic and therefore should also be checked for differences. How would I go about (in JS on the client) extracting the raw contents of a <script src='path'> tag to place into the serialization? I can work around this by manually intercepting these resources but it would be nice if everything can go into one thing for use with the diff.
Is there no way to do this other than by separately re-requesting those JS resources (not from script tags) with ajax?
So, I've written a little javascript widget. All a user has to do is paste a script tag into the page, and right below it I insert a div with all of the content the user has requested.
Many sites do similar things, such as Twitter, Delicious and even StackOverflow.
What I'm curious about is how to test this widget to make sure that it will work properly on everyone's webpage. I'm not using an iframe, so I really want to make sure that this code will work when inserted most places. I know it looks the same in all browsers.
Suggestions? Or should I just build one hundred web pages and insert my script tag and see if it works? I would hope there is an easier way than that.
Once you have confirmed that your javascript works cross-browser in a controlled environment, here are some things that might cause problems when used on an actual website:
CSS
You're using a CSS class that is already being used (for a different purpose) by the target website
You're using positioning that might interfere with the site's CSS
The elements you are using are being styled by the website's CSS (you might want to use some sort of "reset" CSS that applies only to your widget)
HTML
You're creating elements with the same id attribute as an element that already exists on the website
You're specifying a name attribute that is already being used (while name can be used for multiple elements, you may not be expecting that)
Javascript
What is the expected behaviour without Javascript enabled? If your script creates everything, is it acceptable for nothing to be present without JS?
At very basic you should make sure your widget works for following test-cases. I am sure then it will work on all web-pages -
http/https: There should not be any warning for HTTPS pages for unencrypted content.
<script> / <no-script>: What if JavaScript is disabled? Is your widget still visible?
What happens when third-party cookies are disabled? Does your widget still work?
Layout-box restrictions: When parent div element's size is less than your widget. Does your widget overflow the given size and destroys owners page?
By keeping all your Javascripts under a namespace (global object) with a very unique name, you should be pretty much OK. Also, you can simply use an anonymous function if you just want to print out something.
Similar question: How to avoid name clashes in JavaScript widgets
I have been tasked with improving the current mess that is our JavaScript "strategy"; we're an online shopping company and my boss has given me time to do this properly. He is very keen on keepin this modular and increase the reusability of the components.
Our HTML is being rendered with JSP and we have lots of custom tags writing out, for example, information about products without the web designers needing to worry about it.
Now, we want to do similar things with JavaScript. The web designers should be given a set of custom tags, like, say,
<foo:draggable>
... some HTML here ...
</foo:draggable>
that will wrap the HTML in a <div> with a drag bar at the top and a close button.
My idea is to mark the div with a unique namespaced CSS class name, like foo_draggable, and then put all my functions in a single JS file. That JS file then sees if there are elements with the CSS class foo_draggable in the DOM and if it finds any it will attach the required event handlers.
However, I am worried about scaling problems, and wondering whether it is a good idea to have lots of selector queries running when they quite often aren't going to be used.
The first alternative would be to initiate each draggable item explicitly but that would mean putting <script> tags all over the place. The second approach would be to not put all UI function in one file but rather just download the ones I need, but that would mean lots more HTTP requests and slower page load speed.
Has anyone got experience with this?
What about having two classnames?
<div class='foo fooDragable'></div>
<div class='foo fooSortable'></div>
You add the class 'foo' to all your elements that require javascript modification.
Your javascript has to check the dom only once for foo.
var $foo = $('.foo');
Afterwards you can search within this array which should be way smaller than the complete dom.
var $dragAble = $foo.filter('.fooDragable');
Have you considered or taken a look to JSF? I know it's a major change if you aren't using JSF yet. But there are lot of ready-to-use JSF component libaries with an ajaxical sauce, for example RichFaces, IceFaces, PrimeFaces, etc. It's almost a waste of time to create components/tags for it yourself.
Alternatively you can replace all Javascripts to use the great jQuery JS framework.
Depending on how many separate components you have, the extra overhead of running the selectors might not be a big deal. You can initialize all the components just the once, when the page is loaded. Anything that's not present on the page simply won't get initialized, and will incur no further overhead. In most JavaScript frameworks, selecting by classname (or tag name) is pretty fast. It's only the complex selectors, which aren't natively supported by the browser, that are slow.
If you have a few commonly used components, and then a set of less commonly used ones, it may be worth splitting those up. Keep the commonly used components in a single JavaScript file (minified, served with compression and aggressive caching), and load that in every page, regardless of whether it's needed or not. Caching will ensure it's only downloaded once, and it'll only be one small HTTP request. For the less common components, keep them in separate files (ideally, one per component), and add a script tag on pages that use them.
I'm not entirely familiar with how JSP works, but it might be possible to do this automatically - if a tag is included in the document, add a script tag for foo_widget.js in the document header, or something like that.