Now most browsers support getBoundingClientRect method, which has become the best practice. Using an old answer is very slow, not accurate and has several bugs.
The solution selected as correct is almost never precise.
This solution was tested on Internet Explorer 7 (and later), iOS 5 (and later) Safari, Android 2.0 (Eclair) and later, BlackBerry, Opera Mobile, and Internet Explorer Mobile 9.
function isElementInViewport (el) {
// Special bonus for those using jQuery
if (typeof jQuery === "function" && el instanceof jQuery) {
el = el[0];
}
var rect = el.getBoundingClientRect();
return (
rect.top >= 0 &&
rect.left >= 0 &&
rect.bottom <= (window.innerHeight || document.documentElement.clientHeight) && /* or $(window).height() */
rect.right <= (window.innerWidth || document.documentElement.clientWidth) /* or $(window).width() */
);
}
How to use:
You can be sure that the function given above returns correct answer at the moment of time when it is called, but what about tracking element's visibility as an event?
Place the following code at the bottom of your <body>
tag:
function onVisibilityChange(el, callback) {
var old_visible;
return function () {
var visible = isElementInViewport(el);
if (visible != old_visible) {
old_visible = visible;
if (typeof callback == 'function') {
callback();
}
}
}
}
var handler = onVisibilityChange(el, function() {
/* Your code go here */
});
// jQuery
$(window).on('DOMContentLoaded load resize scroll', handler);
/* // Non-jQuery
if (window.addEventListener) {
addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', handler, false);
addEventListener('load', handler, false);
addEventListener('scroll', handler, false);
addEventListener('resize', handler, false);
} else if (window.attachEvent) {
attachEvent('onDOMContentLoaded', handler); // Internet Explorer 9+ :(
attachEvent('onload', handler);
attachEvent('onscroll', handler);
attachEvent('onresize', handler);
}
*/
If you do any DOM modifications, they can change your element's visibility of course.
Guidelines and common pitfalls:
Maybe you need to track page zoom / mobile device pinch? jQuery should handle zoom/pinch cross browser, otherwise first or second link should help you.
If you modify DOM, it can affect the element's visibility. You should take control over that and call handler()
manually. Unfortunately, we don't have any cross browser onrepaint
event. On the other hand that allows us to make optimizations and perform re-check only on DOM modifications that can change an element's visibility.
Never Ever use it inside jQuery $(document).ready() only, because there is no warranty CSS has been applied in this moment. Your code can work locally with your CSS on a hard drive, but once put on a remote server it will fail.
After DOMContentLoaded
is fired, styles are applied, but the images are not loaded yet. So, we should add window.onload
event listener.
We can't catch zoom/pinch event yet.
The last resort could be the following code:
/* TODO: this looks like a very bad code */
setInterval(handler, 600);
You can use the awesome feature pageVisibiliy of the HTML5 API if you care if the tab with your web page is active and visible.
TODO: this method does not handle two situations:
Best Answer
By the time script is executed,
document
element is not available yet, becausescript
itself is in thehead
. While it's a valid solution to keepscript
inhead
and render onDOMContentLoaded
event, it's even better to put yourscript
at the very bottom of thebody
and render root component to adiv
before it like this:and in the
bundle.js
, call:You should always render to a nested
div
instead ofbody
. Otherwise, all sorts of third-party code (Google Font Loader, browser plugins, whatever) can modify thebody
DOM node when React doesn't expect it, and cause weird errors that are very hard to trace and debug. Read more about this issue.The nice thing about putting
script
at the bottom is that it won't block rendering until script load in case you add React server rendering to your project.Update: (October 07, 2015 | v0.14)
Example: