[Javascript] Efficiency of innerHTML over DOM tree manipulation

[tedd at sperling.com (tedd)]

At 5:02 PM +0100 6/28/06, Matt Barton wrote:
>I'm pretty certain I know what the problem is - it's generating some (deliberately) extremely complicated pages, and a fair amount of page generation, after loading the page, in javascript.  I'm after finding out the best way to make that as efficient as possible.
>
>-snip-
>
>Ultimately, without meaning to sound ungrateful, when I asked my question, I was specifically not asking "how do I make my page quicker", I was asking which of the two methods I proposed was the most efficient.


Okay, fair enough and no offense taken.

BUT, not that you asked, there might be a third way -- I do all of my dB stuff in the background in php and use the speed of the server and not reply upon the speed of the user's machine. I use js for user prompts and checks -- and ajax for quick changes in scenery.

Others here may hammer me for this -- but I find that my mysql stuff is very quick on the server side. I can do 50,000 mysql operations in under one-half second. Heck, it just takes 20 seconds to create and populate 50,000 records from scratch.

However, I'm relative new at this and may not know what you're actually asking -- I just know that what I do works for me. I can't imagine creating a massive enough web page with all sorts of controls that wouldn't load quickly (unless you have graphics or other files to load with it). As such, I don't see any reason why it should not load quickly.

Just how big is one of your pages? You may want (as others have suggested) to distribute your controls over common themes and pages. But then again, I come from the Macintosh development side of things where GUI controls are pretty commonplace and we do stuff like that all the time.

In any event, good luck.

tedd

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