Firefox extension data transfer to web page

Question

I have a firefox extension that collaborates with a web page, and occasionally needs to inject data into it which the page formats and displays.

The way I do it now is :-

var element = doc.createElement("MyData");
doc.documentElement.appendChild(element);

for(....)
{
    var x = ....
    var y = ....
    var z = ....

    var row = doc.createElement("row");
    row.setAttribute("x", x);
    row.setAttribute("y", y);
    row.setAttribute("z", z);
    element.appendChild(row);
}

This gets really slow for 1000s of items, and some more time is spent by the page parsing the data and displaying it in HTML elements.

Is there a better way? Would it make sense to dump the entire data as a single string for example?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

In my experience with regular site scripting, large HTML insertions appear to be faster if you inject raw HTML with the .innerHTML property. Perhaps that's true for extensions as well.