Question

Is there a way in JavaScript to get the contents of a linked file without making a second GET request? That is, if I have

<link rel="foo" href="bar.txt">

the browser should automatically download bar.txt. Is there any way to read its contents without getting it again (i.e. via jQuery’s $.get or similar)?

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Edit

I could use a second GET request and as mentioned in the comments there likely wouldn’t be a performance hit, but this question is mainly a thought experiment: it seems like it’d be pretty standard functionality, but more and more things point to this not being possible. Is there a reason why?

Answer 1

If the tag has absolutly no other purpose than being a placeholder for the source, then the objective is to prevent the first get rather then the second 😉 By using another attribute you avoid the default behaviour.

<link data-src='file.txt' />

‘data-…’ is a valid HTML5 attribute you can use right now, though the html will not be valid if an older doctype is declared but will still work.

Next when using jQuery:

$('link[data-src]').each(function(){
    var self = $(this)
    , src = self.attr('data-src');
    $.get(src, function(fileContent){
        // do stuff with fileContent
    })
});

Obviously any element will do rather then the link element when using ‘data-…’, I use this technique myself to add data in a component based architecture, lazily binding resources and meta information to components without it affecting default behaviours/renditions.