Question

Maybe it is a silly question but I am a very confused with JavaScript. I follow this code organisation with as much as possible unobtrusive JavaScript. I build a website in Ruby on Rails that uses Google Maps.

My scenario: Suppose I have a REALLY enormous website in which, in different pages, I need to initiate JavaScript scripts which do some actions.

A problem is that I have to add ALL the JavaScript code of my website to the user’s browser regardless of which page the user visits. For instance, let’s say I have page A which uses enormous JavaScript code and page B which uses some tiny JavaScript code. As far as I understand, in page B the user will have to retrieve ALL the JavaScript code (that is, for both pages A and B). Isn’t that a little impractical?

What is more, for both pages, JavaScript is initiated by document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function, false); function. However, the function of page A supposes that there is a div named “pageA” (which uses as a reference in order to modify it or add elements through js scripts) and similarly the function of page B supposes that there is a div named “pageB”. Hence, when I am on page B I receive js error that there is no element of “pageA”. How can I avoid that ?

Given the fact that, for every single page I have to load the user with my whole JavaScript code (that is for all pages) how can I initiate(that is, to start immediately when page loads and not after a user event happens) page specific JavaScript code without any such errors? I am really confused!

Wooho very fast responses thanx guys! But I never said I write the whole js code in 1 single file. Instead I uses RoR’s organisation! (which btw combines all files into one single file). To clarify my problem, in different files I initiate events for page A and events for page B (or C etc..). The code fires as soon as DOMContentLoaded event happens. However when the user is on page B I don’t want to fire the events for page A. Or similarly, I want to load only js for page B (so that no event for page A fires). How can I do that?

PS: If you think a better title, feel free to suggest it!

Answer 1

If you keep your Javascript code in a single file it only has to be loaded once (and perhaps even compiled once, see this), when a user requests their first page of your website. Then the browser will use a cached copy unless you disallow caching (bad configuration of your web server can do that).

When you do something like (JQuery):

$('#nosuchid').something();

or e.g.

$('.nosuchclass').each(function(i, el) { ... });

there will be no error and no effect if no matching elements exist in your markup. If you use, say, document.getElementById(), it will return null if no elements match and you will have to handle that case. If you do that properly there aren’t going to be any errors.

As you can imagine, the code which is skipped doesn’t take time to execute, so there’s no reason to expect performance problems, either.