What is the DOM ready event?

Question

I need to fire a script as soon as the page content (the whole HTML element) has been received, but it doesn't have to be rendered yet.

I assume that just having a simple <script> tag that executes some code at the very top of my page should do the trick?

To formulate the question differently: does DOM ready mean that all elements and resources have been pulled and rendered?

Answer 1

DOM ready means that all the HTML has been received and parsed by the browser into the DOM tree which can now be manipulated.

It occurs before the page has been fully rendered (as external resources may have not yet fully downloaded - including images, CSS, JavaScript and any other linked resources).

The actual event is called DOMContentLoaded.

Answer 2

DOMready means: The DOM structure has been built in browser memory. Asynchronously the page already started rendering, but it might not be finished yet as external resources like images, videos etc. will finish loading later.

Answer 3

You might also try with the functions

window.onload = function(){
   //your code
  }

or

body.onload = function(){
   //your code
  }

if you don't want to use jQuery.

Be careful though, DOM loaded doesn't mean the page loaded, iframes, javascript, images and css might load after that event.

There is a good tuto on DOM events Javascript tutorial

Answer 4

The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cross-platform and language-independent convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML, XHTML and XML documents.[1] The nodes of every document are organized in a tree structure, called the DOM tree