Better Performance, Empty Elements Or Create And Destroy With Javascript?

Question

What would be better for performance, having many hidden elements on a page, or creating them and destroying them as they are needed with javascript upon request. For exampl

Answer 1

Creating and destroying DOM elements is about the slowest operation you could do in JavaScript, especially in IE. Having many hidden elements will take up more memory and will probably take a bit longer to load initially, but think of it as a cache: you're caching these elements for later use, and just reusing them when you need them, instead of creating and destroying them on the fly.

However, if you aren't doing this on a very large scale (hundreds/thousands of elements), it probably won't matter. The time it takes to create or destroy a single DOM element is negligible, so if that's your case, do whatever would be easier for you.