Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

I’ve been using domFunction() to determine whether it’s safe to do all of my DOM modification code, but with some testing, I noticed that some pages were causing Firefox to eat up huge amounts of CPU time. I tracked the error down to the domFunction call, as it uses setInterval() to run a function every n seconds. This in itself is nice to know (I was looking for a similar feature a couple of days ago), but the nice part is that it has a stopping function: clearInterval().

You are supposed to use it like this:

timer = setInterval("Function();", interval);

This will then call the function Function every interval milliseconds. Neato. Except I only want a particular thing to happen once. So, as a part of my code, I was calling clearInterval(timer) inside a function called by Function.

function Startup(){
    Gravatars();
    .
    .
    .
    HumanTimePosts();

    clearInterval(timer);
}

//Code for all functions in here.

timer = setInterval(function(){
    if (document.getElementById(\"footer\")){
        Startup();
    }
}, 1000);

Which should work. Except for some reason, calls to clearInterval cannot come from inside functions called by setInterval. Or something like that.

My next solution was to use:

function checkDOM(){
    if (getById("footer")||getById("credit")) Startup();
    else setTimeout("checkDOM();",100);
}
setTimeout("checkDOM();"

Which solves the problem, but it ugly. Finally, I came across this little number:

if (document.addEventListener) {
    document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", Startup, null);
}

This only works with Mozilla browsers, so for the time being I’ve combined the last two.

 

« Older : Recursion

New Script Online : Newer »