When should I use jQuery's document.ready function?

Question 1

When should I use jQuery's document.ready function?

javascript jquery dom event-handling document-ready

tim peterson · Oct 25, 2012 · Viewed 72.4k times · Source

Answer

Answer

In simple words,

$(document).ready is an event which fires up when document is ready.

Suppose you have placed your jQuery code in head section and trying to access a dom element (an anchor, an img etc), you will not be able to access it because html is interpreted from top to bottom and your html elements are not present when your jQuery code runs.

To overcome this problem, we place every jQuery/javascript code (which uses DOM) inside $(document).ready function which gets called when all the dom elements can be accessed.

And this is the reason, when you place your jQuery code at the bottom (after all dom elements, just before </body>) , there is no need for $(document).ready

There is no need to place on method inside $(document).ready only when you use on method on document because of the same reason I explained above.

    //No need to be put inside $(document).ready
    $(document).on('click','a',function () {
    })

    // Need to be put inside $(document).ready if placed inside <head></head>
    $('.container').on('click','a',function () {
    });

EDIT

From comments,

$(document).ready does not wait for images or scripts. Thats the big difference between $(document).ready and $(document).load
Only code that accesses the DOM should be in ready handler. If it's a plugin, it shouldn't be in the ready event.

Question 2

I was told to use document.ready when I first started to use Javascript/jQuery but I never really learned why.

Might someone provide some basic guidelines on when it makes sense to wrap javascript/jquery code inside jQuery's document.ready?

Some topics I'm interested in:

jQuery's .on() method: I use the .on() method for AJAX quite a bit (typically on dynamically created DOM elements). Should the .on() click handlers always be inside document.ready?
Performance: Is it more performant to keep various javascript/jQuery objects inside or outside document.ready (also, is the performance difference significant?)?
Object scope: AJAX-loaded pages can't access objects that were inside the prior page's document.ready, correct? They can only access objects which were outside document.ready (i.e., truly "global" objects)?

Update: To follow a best practice, all my javascript (the jQuery library and my app's code) is at the bottom of my HTML page and I'm using the defer attribute on the jQuery-containing scripts on my AJAX-loaded pages so that I can access the jQuery library on these pages.

When should I use jQuery's document.ready function?

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