I want to use AJAX to load an htmlfile into a <div> I will then need to run jsMath on this. Everything I have done so far with innerHTML has been a paragraph or two, maybe a table and/or image. Nothing too fancy.
What potential problems may occur when I set innerHTML to an external 25k file, with all sorts of complex css formatting? (thanks to jsMath) I can't think of any other method of doing this, but need to know if there are any limitations.
Thanks in advance.
--Dave
There's nothing to prevent you from doing this technically. The biggest issue will be page load time. Be sure to include some sort of indication that the data is loading or it will look like nothing's happening.
In the application I am currently working on, I have not had any problems in any browser setting innerHTML to a string of 30k or more. (Don't know what the limit is)
The only kind of limits that are on this type of thing are purely bandwidth and processor related. You should make sure you don't have a low timeout set on your ajax request. You should also test on some lower speed computers to see if there is a memory issue. Some old browsers can be pretty unforgiving of large objects in memory.
You'll probably want to profile this with a tool like dynatrace ajax or speed tracer to understand how setting innerHTML to a really huge value affects performance. You might want to compare it with another approach like putting the new content in an iframe, or paginating the content.
your limit will be most likely the download limit set from your web server. usually a couple of MBs.Several web frameworks allows increasing this size but you cant just do that because that would mean increase buffer size which is not a good thing.
I was wondering the exact same thing, becuase i have a problem with innerhtml, at least now i know the file size is not the problem