window.onload vs $(document).ready()

javascript jquery dom-events unobtrusive-javascript
Vaibhav Jain picture Vaibhav Jain · Sep 13, 2010 · Viewed 932.8k times · Source

What are the differences between JavaScript's window.onload and jQuery's $(document).ready() method?

Answer

Guffa picture Guffa · Sep 13, 2010

The ready event occurs after the HTML document has been loaded, while the onload event occurs later, when all content (e.g. images) also has been loaded.

The onload event is a standard event in the DOM, while the ready event is specific to jQuery. The purpose of the ready event is that it should occur as early as possible after the document has loaded, so that code that adds functionality to the elements in the page doesn't have to wait for all content to load.

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