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

IMHO you should do another kind of consideration, since is obvious that page load speed is affected by it's size in term of kb.

• How to calculate web page size ?

  • HTML document file size (DOM elements);
  • File sizes graphics - including any background images;
  • Any included (JavaScript (.js), External Sheets (.css), SSI, PHP files etc) files sizes;
  • File sizes of preloaded data such as images;
  • Sizes of any multimedia content such as sound, video, Flash files etc. that are embedded in the web page;

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• what is the maximum size?

  • Each web page should not be more than 50kb. This will guarantee that web pages load in a matter of seconds.
  • iPhone won't cache components bigger than 25K.

so, your problem is not properly the number of dom elements, you have a lot of things to do before care of hidden elements number! ;) hope this help

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REFERENCE:

• Optimizing web pages- Maximum page size
• Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site
• Using site speed in web search ranking
• Javascript Performance
• JavaScript Performance Best Practices

TOOLS

• Page Speed, the Web Performance Tool