I’m writing a single page application. When the page is initially served, it contains many DOM elements that contain json strings that I’m injecting into the page.
When the page loads on the client, the first thing that happens is that these DOM elements are parsed from json to javascript objects and then they’re never used again.
Would there be a performance benefit into deleting them from the DOM and reducing its size? I haven’t found any conclusive data about this aspect. For info, these elements are about 500K in size.
Thanks for your suggestions.
Independent of whether you pull the JSON from the DOM, you might consider this technique for including your JSON objects:
Browsers will completely ignore the contents of those scripts (except of course for embedded strings that look like
</script>, which it occurs to me as things a JSON serializer might want to somehow deal with), so you don’t risk running into proplems with embedded ampersands and things. That’s probably a performance win in and of itself: the browser probably has an easier time looking for the end of the<script>block than it does looking through stuff that it thinks is actual content. You can get the content verbatim with.innerHTML.