I have a web page which is chock full of javascript, and a few references to resources like images for the javascript to work with. I use a websocket to communicate with the server; the javascript parses the socket's data and does things with the page presentation accordingly. It all works fine, except when it doesn't.
The problem appears to be that that page contains images which I want to display parts of, under javascript control. No matter how I play with defer, there are apparently situations in which the images don't seem to be fully downloaded before the javascript tries to use them. The result is images are missing when the page is rendered, some small percentage of the time.
I'm not very used to languages and protocols where you don't have strict control over what happens when, so the server and browser shipping stuff and executing stuff in an uncontrolled and asynch order annoys me. So I'd like to stop depending on apparently unreliable tricks like defer. What I'd like to do is just download the whole page, and then open my websocket and send my images and other resources down through it. When that process is complete, I'll know it's safe to accept other commands from the websocket and get on with doing what the page does. In other words I want to subvert the browsers asynch handling of resources, and handle it all serially under javascript control.
Pouring an image file from the server down a socket is easy and I have no trouble coming up with protocols to do it. Capturing the data as byte arrays, also easy.
But how do I get them interpreted as images?
I know there are downsides to this approach. I won't get browser caching of my images and the initial page won't load as quickly. I'm ok with that. I'm just tired of 95% working solutions and having to wonder if what I did works in every browser imaginable. (Working on everything from IE 8 to next year's Chrome is a requirement for me.)
Is this approach viable? Are there better ways to get strict, portable control of resource loading?
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" defer>It is the last thing in the <body> section.The script starts with a large number of variable declarations, including a bunch of image placeholders like var cardsImage = new Image();