managing document.ready event(s) on a large-scale website

Question

NOTE: I have now created a jQuery plugin which is my attempt of a solution to this issue. I am sure that it could be improved and i\'ve probably overlooked lots of use c

Answer 1

"The problem is that we have one JS file"

I'm not sure how you can avoid it as long as you are including the same (merged) JS file for all pages. You could use some server-side logic to merge different pieces to go with different pages, but then you presumably lose the benefits of client-side caching of the JS, so...

Projects I've worked on have (typically) used multiple JS files, a couple being common to every page, and the others being included or not as appropriate - some JS files included by only one page. This means that pretty much every page includes the common library functions whether they use them or not, but the common JS file gets cached so it doesn't really matter. Page-specific code really is page-specific.

I can't tell from your question whether you are aware of it, but you can have multiple document ready handlers (I believe jQuery executes them in the order they were bound?). So if you do split the JS up each JS file can include its own document ready. Of course that approach has its own overhead, but I think it's better than putting everything in the same file.