A couple of weeks ago, I attended a talk by Steve Souders http://stevesouders.com/ He is "Chief Performance Yahoo!" He has a new book coming out about performance on the web.
One of his points was to include Javascript at the bottom of the page. But even he admitted that this is not practical in many cases. Basically, if you can wait to load a script at the bottom of the page or dynamically load it, that is better. But often times you just can't -----Original Message----- From: jquery-en@googlegroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Fil Sent: Monday, July 16, 2007 10:06 AM To: jquery-en@googlegroups.com Subject: [jQuery] Re: dev tip: combining JS script files > This is a good page on optimzing javascript for speed... > > http://betterexplained.com/articles/speed-up-your-javascript-load-time/ This part of the text seems contradictory with jQuery's habits. Why do we load jQuery.js and all its plugins in the <head> section? (answer: to have .ready()). But should we do it all the time and for all plugins? Optimize Javascript Placement Place your javascript at the end of your HTML file if possible. Notice how Google analytics and other stat tracking software wants to be right before the closing </body> tag. This allows the majority of page content (like images, tables, text) to be loaded and rendered first. The user sees content loading, so the page looks responsive. At this point, the heavy javascripts can begin loading near the end. I used to have all my javascript crammed into the <head> section, but this was unnecessary. Only core files that are absolutely needed in the beginning of the page load should be there. The rest, like cool menu effects, transitions, etc. can be loaded later. You want the page to appear responsive (i.e., something is loading) up front. -- Fil
