Script async, Raindrop and Firefox 3.6

In honor of the Firefox 3.6 release, I upgraded Raindrop to use the new async attribute for script tags.

Why is async neat? It does not block the rest of the page, and will just evaluate the script once it is retrieved. More information is in the HTML5 spec. Note that the script you add async to should NOT use document.write(), as doc.write will likely destroy your page.

Also, be aware that async is a boolean attribute, but that does not mean you should use async="true" to turn it on. The HTML5 spec on boolean attributes says that a value of empty string or a string that matches the attribute name should only be used. To avoid async, just do not include the attribute. For Raindrop, I used async="async" since that looks better to me than an empty string.

Raindrop uses RunJS for the module loader, and RunJS uses dynamically added script tags via head.appendChild(), so the modules loaded by RunJS already behave in an async manner.

However apps that want to use the raindrop front end libraries normally include a script called rdconfig.js as their own script file, and that config file does a document.write to write out the Dojo+RunJS and jQuery tags. Those Dojo+RunJS and jQuery tags now use the async attribute.