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

[Jonas Sicking]

It's a good point. Curious to hear what other people are thinking.

/ Jonas

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:10 AM, Nicholas Zakas <nzakas at yahoo-inc.com> wrote:
> 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.
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> -Nicholas
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> ______________________________________________
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> Commander Lock: "Damnit Morpheus, not everyone believes what you believe!"
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> Morpheus: "My beliefs do not require them to."
>
> ________________________________
>
> 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.
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> 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.
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> -Brian
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> 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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