Asyncronus javascript rendering widgets

Question

I'm creating a javascript widget so third partys (web designers) can post a link on their website and it will render the widget on their site. Currently, I'm doing this with just a script link tag:

<div class="some_random_div_in_html_body">
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://remotehost.com/link/to/widget.js'></script> 
</div>

However, this has the side-effect of slowing down a thrid party's website render times of the page if my site is under a load. Therefore, I'd like the third party website to request the widget link from my site asyncronously and then render it on their site when the widget link loads completely. The Google Analytics javascript snippet seems to have a nice bit of asyncronous code that does a nice async request to model off of, but I'm wondering if I can modify it so that it will render content on the third party's site.

Using the example below, I want the content of http://mysite.com/link/to/widget.js to render something in the "message" id field.

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>Third Party Site</TITLE><STYLE>#message { background-color: #eee; } </STYLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<div id="message">asdf</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
  (function() {
   var ga = document.createElement('script'); 
   ga.type = 'text/javascript'; 
   ga.async = true;
   ga.src = 'http://mysite.com/link/to/widget.js';
   var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; 
    s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
 })();
</script>
</BODY>
</HTML>

I don't know if what I'm trying to do constitutes Cross Site Scripting (still a bit vague on that concept) but am wondering if what I'm trying to do is possible. Or if anyone has any other approaches to creating javascript widgets effectively, I'd appreciate any advice. Thanks for reading this. Joe

Ryan · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-02 21:31:24Z

2

Great article comparing all the different methods :-

http://friendlybit.com/js/lazy-loading-asyncronous-javascript/

answered Mar 2, 2011 at 21:31

Ryan

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Comments

tcooc · Accepted Answer · 2010-06-17 00:03:51Z

1

Sorry to say that crossdomain xhr is blocked by all browsers. The google analytics google.load() function actually adds script tags to the head element, not use xhr. And the "async" attribute is part of HTML5 and only implemented in Firefox 3.6.

You could use an event listener to dynamically load the script when the document is loaded and add append the widget to a predetermined element(ie. with an id).

answered Jun 17, 2010 at 0:03

tcooc

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1 Comment

Joe Jasinski Over a year ago

Thanks for clarifying that digitalFresh. I'll look into the event listener approach.

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