Interessanter Artikel, der unter anderem kurz auf die SCRIPT-Tag-Problematik eingeht.
Optimizing Page Loading in the Web Browser: It is well understood that page loading speed in a web browser is limited by the available connection bandwidth. However, it turns out bandwidth is not the only limiting factor and in many cases it is not even the most important one.
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It turns out that figuring out ‘all the associated resources’ is the hard part of the problem. The browser does not know what resources it should load until it has completely parsed the document. When the browser first receives the HTML text of the document it feeds it to the parser. The parser builds a DOM tree out of the document. When the browser sees an element like <img src> that references an external resource it requests that resources from the network.
Problems start when a document contains references to external scripts, <script src>. Any script can call document.write(). Parsing can’t proceed further before the script is fully loaded and executed and any document.write() output has been inserted into the document text. Since parsing is not proceeding while the script is being loaded no further requests for other resources are made either. This quickly leads to a situation where the script is the only resource loading and connection parallelism does not get exploited at all. A series of script tags essentially loads serially, hugely amplifying effect of the latency.
The situation is made worse by scripts that load additional resources. Since those resources are not known before the script is executed it is critical to load scripts as quickly as possible. The worst case is a script that load more scripts (by using document.write() to write <script> tags), a common pattern in Javascript frameworks and ad scripts.
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(Via Surfin’ Safari.)