How can I incrementally load html in Webkit?

Question

Hi,

I have a large amount of XHTML content, that I would like to display in WebKit. Unfortunately, Webkit is running on a mobile platform with fairly slow hardware, so loading a large HTML file all at once is REALLY slow. Therefore I would like to gradually load HTML content. I have split my data in small chunks and am looking for the proper way to feed it into WebKit.

Presumably I would use javascript? What's the right way of doing it through javascript? I'm trying document.body.innerHTML += 'some data'. Which doesn't seem to do very much - possibly because my chunks may not be valid standalone html. I've also tried document.body.innerText += 'some data'. Which doesn't seem to work.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

This sounds like a perfect candidate for Ajax based "lazy" content loading that starts loading content while the user scrolls down the page. There are several jQuery plugins for this. This is one of them.

You will have to have valid chunks for this in any case, though. Also, I'm not sure how your hardware is going to react to this. If the problem is RAM or hard disk memory, you may encounter the same problems no matter how you load the data. Only if it's the actual connection or the speed at which the page is loaded, will lazy loading make sense.

Answer 2

Load it as needed via ajax. I have a similar circumstance, and as the user scrolls near the end of the page, it loads another 50 entries. Because each entry contains many js events, too many entries degrades performance; so after 200 records, I remove 50 from the other end of the list as the user scrolls.

No need to reinvent the wheel. Use jQuery's ajax method (and the many shorthand variantes out there): http://api.jquery.com/category/ajax/