[whatwg] should async scripts block the document's load event?

[Nicholas Zakas]

To me "asynchronous" fundamentally means "doesn't block other things
from happening," so if async currently does block the load event from
firing then that seems very wrong to me.

 

-Nicholas

 

______________________________________________

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________________________________

From: whatwg-bounces at lists.whatwg.org
[mailto:whatwg-bounces at lists.whatwg.org] On Behalf Of Brian Kuhn
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2010 8:03 AM
To: Jonas Sicking
Cc: Steve Souders; WHAT Working Group
Subject: Re: [whatwg] should async scripts block the document's load
event?

 

Right.  Async scripts aren't really asynchronous if they block all the
user-visible functionality that sites currently tie to window.onload.

 

I don't know if we need another attribute, or if we just need to change
the behavior for all async scripts.  But I think the best time to fix
this is now; before too many UAs implement async.

 

-Brian

 

 

 

 

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 10:41 PM, Jonas Sicking <jonas at sicking.cc>
wrote:

Though what we want here is a DONTDELAYLOAD attribute. I.e. we want
load to start asap, but we don't want the load to hold up the load
event if all other resources finish loading before this one.

/ Jonas


On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 10:23 PM, Steve Souders <whatwg at souders.org>
wrote:
> I just sent email last week proposing a POSTONLOAD attribute for
scripts.
>
> -Steve
>
> On 2/10/2010 5:18 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 4:22 PM, Brian Kuhn<bnkuhn at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> No one has any thoughts on this?
>>> It seems to me that the purpose of async scripts is to get out of
the way
>>> of
>>> user-visible functionality.  Many sites currently attach
user-visible
>>> functionality to window.onload, so it would be great if async
scripts at
>>> least had a way to not block that event.  It would help minimize the
>>> affect
>>> that secondary-functionality like ads and web analytics have on the
user
>>> experience.
>>> -Brian
>>>
>>
>> I'm concerned that this is too big of a departure from how people are
>> used to<script>s behaving.
>>
>> If we do want to do something like this, one possibility would be to
>> create a generic attribute that can go on things like<img>,<link
>> rel=stylesheet>,<script>  etc that make the resource not block the
>> 'load' event.
>>
>> / Jonas
>>
>

 

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