Where to place JavaScript in an HTML file?
Say I have a fairly hefty JavaScript file, packed down to roughly 100kb or so. By file I mean it’s an external file that would be linked in via <script src="...">, not pasted into the HTML itself.
Where’s the best place to put this in the HTML?
<html>
<head>
<!-- here? -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="stylez.css" type="text/css" />
<!-- here? -->
</head>
<body>
<!-- here? -->
<p>All the page content ...</p>
<!-- or here? -->
</body>
</html>
Will there be any functional difference between each of the options?
The Yahoo! Exceptional Performance team recommend placing scripts at the bottom of your page because of the way browsers download components.
Of course Levi's comment "just before you need it and no sooner" is really the correct answer, i.e. "it depends".
The best place for it is just before you need it and no sooner.
Also, depending on your users' physical location, using a service like Amazon's S3 service may help users download it from a server physically closer to them than your server.
Is your js script a commonly used lib like jQuery or prototype? If so, there are a number of companies, like Google and Yahoo, that have tools to provide these files for you on a distributed network.
As a rule of thumb, the best place to put <script> tags is the bottom of the page, just before </body> tag. Something like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>My awesome page</title>
<!-- CSS -->
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="...">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="...">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="...">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="...">
</head>
<body>
<!-- Content content content -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="..."></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="..."></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="..."></script>
</body>
</html>
Why?
The problem caused by scripts is that they block parallel downloads. The HTTP/1.1 specification suggests that browsers download no more than two components in parallel per hostname. If you serve your images from multiple hostnames, you can get more than two downloads to occur in parallel. While a script is downloading, however, the browser won't start any other downloads, even on different hostnames. More...
CSS
A little bit off-topic, but... Put stylesheets at the top.
While researching performance at Yahoo!, we discovered that moving stylesheets to the document HEAD makes pages appear to be loading faster. This is because putting stylesheets in the HEAD allows the page to render progressively. More...
Further reading
Yahoo have released a really cool guide that lists best practices to speed up a website. Definitely worth reading: https://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html