Script.aculo.us's own dynamic loader breaks in Chrome

[haarts]

Using LABjs to load Prototype and Scriptaculous from a CDN results sometimes in a blank page when using Chrome. The page is seen to load properly but after a fraction of a second the screen turns blank. The page is 'still there', that is inspecting the source reveals all the proper HTML. This behaviour is not consistent, sometimes it does work.

I tried setting AlwaysPreserveOrder to true, to no effect.
I tried moving off the CDN but that resulted in the dynamic libs (such as effects/builder/etc) not to be load at all. It would work when explicitly calling/loading these libs. The blanking would disappear. This makes me believe loading via XHR (UseLocalXHR) has some effect, which I do not know.

This behaviour can (sometimes as it's not consistent) be seen on our staging server at http://staging.delaagsterekening.nl.

The offending file is http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/scriptaculous/1.8.3/scriptaculous.js

Probably the solution is staring me in the face.

[haarts]

Actually this is a Webkit issue. Safari is also affected.

[getify]

It's the use of document.write() in that file. document.write() is NOT compatible with dynamic loaders. There's a race condition inherent that if document.write() is executed before onload, then things are probably ok, but if it goes after that (which can happen intermittently) a document.write() will screw up the page. It can crash IE, and the behavior of seeing the page go blank is quite expected when document.write() runs after a page is loaded.

The solution is to load scriptaculous manually, then load any other files that don't have document.write() in them with LABjs.

I really wish the frameworks would get their act together (like jQuery did) and get rid of this junk that makes dynamic loading impossible.

[haarts]

Yet another reason to switch to jQuery. :S

Thanks for the explaination. I got around the problem by hacking Scriptaculous and removing the dynamic loading of the modules. I then loaded them myself by pointing LABjs to the correct files.

[aakoch]

Isn't the right fix to remove the document.write() statements?

[haarts]

That is what I ended up doing.