On 8/13/07, Simetrical Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
JavaScript URLs are usually viewed as a Bad Thing. Is there a demonstrable performance problem with adding the hooks dynamically?
I didn't mean to cast my example as a JavaScript URL. Rather, it's intended to be an onclick event attached to a null (or optionally, user specified) anchor tag.
My understanding is that doing so is not considered evil at least in so far as using JS at all is not considered evil.
Right now the performance impact of scanning anchors is below the bound I can normally measure on typical pages. But if you bring up an unusual page with many thousands of external links it does produces a measurable and notable decrease in speed.
It also seems rather inelegant to me to scan the document just to insert hooks like that which could just as easily be provided explicitly.