Question

I’m showing tooltips like this

$(clickedElement).append('<span id="activeHelpTip" class="helpTip">Loading help...</span>');
$('#activeHelpTip').remove();

A colleague suggested that on page load I append ALL possible tooltips with visibility none, and show/hide them on demand.

What’s the difference? Who cares?

Edit: Is it relevant that tooltips are provided by an ajax service?

Answer 1

Maintainability aside – what you are doing will perform well, following best practices for tight scoping of selectors. So there is no performance reason to change.

From a maintainability perspective its definitely could be improved to make the list of tips more editable – getting the text away from the mark up.