Programming Tips #7 “XHTML Analytics”

December 7th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

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Next up on my programming tips series we have another guest post. This one is written by Jonathan Holland.

XHTML Analytics

Most analytics packages include a snippet of javascript that you have to add to your page. Nearly all of them rely on using document.write to embed a dynamically generated remote call to their javascript files.

However, using document.write does not work correctly on XHTML markup and is in general a bad practice.

The code below shows a way to dynamicly include a script file in your page without relying on document.write:

var scriptSrc = "SomeUrl.js";
 
// Dynamicly Create a Script Node
 
var scriptTag = document.createElement('script');
 
scriptTag.setAttribute ('src', scriptSrc);
 
scriptTag.setAttribute ('type','text/javascript');
 
// Get a reference to page header
 
var head = document.getElementsByTagName('head');
 
if (head.length > 0) {
 
// Add the dynamically created Script Node to the header.
 
head[0].appendChild (scriptTag);
}

This can be used for google analytics, webtrends, or doubleclick. It allows you to have valid code in your page, and still call to their analytics packages.

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There Are 6 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Travis de Demo on 7 December 2007:

    Why is he smiling? JavaScript doesn’t make developers smile.
    Nevertheless, good tip.

  2. Comment by Nathan Smith on 7 December 2007:

    While I agree that document.write() is in general a very bad practice, I wanted to point out that PPK described how to use it, to ensure that pre-hidden content does not accidentally show visibly as the page loads…

    http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/06/three_javascrip_1.html#link4

  3. Comment by Andrew Bidochko on 10 December 2007:

    JavaScript is a very nice language to work with if you are following best practices and understand JS fundamentals.

    Also you may consider JSON Remote Loader project http://www.sergeychernyshev.com/javascript/remoteloader/ if you need to fetch cross-domain data.

  4. Pingback by developercast.com » Nick Halstead’s Blog: Programming Tips #7 & #8 on 11 December 2007:

    [...] first, tip #7, was written up by Jonathan Holland. He talks about a method of using metrics software that works [...]

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