Benchmark: Parse vs InnerHTML

HTML Preparation code:

<div id="demo"></div>

Script Preparation code:

  var html = ""
  
  for(var i = 0; i++; i < 1000){
     html += `<ol>
    <li>a</li>
    <li>b</li>
  </ol>
  <ol>
    <li>c</li>
    <li>d</li>
  </ol>`;
  }
  
  var demo = document.querySelector("#demo")
  var range = document.createRange();
  var parse = range.createContextualFragment.bind(range);

Tests:

parse()
demo.append(parse(html)); document.querySelector("#demo").innerHTML = ""
innerHTML
demo.innerHTML = html; document.querySelector("#demo").innerHTML = ""

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
parse()
innerHTML

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: one year ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/129.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 129 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
parse()	479376.6 Ops/sec
innerHTML	2991046.0 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated one year ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the provided benchmark and explain what's being tested.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark compares two approaches to set HTML content in an element: using the `innerHTML` property versus creating a DOM context with `createContextualFragment`. The test case uses a loop to generate 1000 elements with nested `<ol>` tags, which is then used to demonstrate the performance difference between these two methods.

**What's being tested?**

The benchmark tests the following options:

1. **innerHTML**: This option sets the inner HTML of an element using `demo.innerHTML = html;`. The `innerHTML` property is a string that represents the HTML content of an element.
2. **parse() (createContextualFragment)**: This option creates a DOM context with `createContextualFragment` and then uses it to parse the generated HTML content into the `demo` element using `demo.append(parse(html));`.

**Pros and Cons**

1. **innerHTML**:
	* Pros:
		+ Simple and widely supported.
		+ Fast, as it bypasses the DOM parser.
	* Cons:
		+ Can lead to security issues if used with untrusted data (e.g., injecting malicious HTML).
		+ May cause issues with HTML parsing and validation.
2. **parse() (createContextualFragment)**:
	* Pros:
		+ More control over the parsing process, as it allows for custom parsing logic.
		+ Can be more efficient if the input data is structured and well-formed.
	* Cons:
		+ More complex to implement, especially when dealing with nested HTML structures.
		+ May have slower performance compared to `innerHTML` due to additional overhead.

**Library: document.createRange()**

The `createRange()` function creates a new range object that represents the user interface for getting and setting text content in an element. The `createContextualFragment()` method is then used to create a DOM context from this range, which allows for more efficient parsing of the generated HTML content.

**Special JS feature/syntax**

There doesn't appear to be any special JavaScript features or syntax being tested in this benchmark. However, it's worth noting that modern browsers support various features like `createContextualFragment`, but their usage and performance may vary across different implementations.

**Alternatives**

Other alternatives for setting HTML content in an element include:

1. **DOMParser**: This API allows parsing HTML strings into DOM nodes.
2. **XMLHttpRequest**: This object can be used to parse and load HTML content from a server-side response.
3. **String.prototype.replace()**: Some browsers support using regular expressions with `String.prototype.replace()` to update the contents of an element.

Keep in mind that each approach has its own trade-offs and use cases, so it's essential to choose the right method for your specific requirements.

Related benchmarks:

Parse vs InnerHTML (version: 0)

Parse vs InnerHTML

Comparing performance of: parse() vs innerHTML

Created: 8 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

parse()

innerHTML

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated one year ago):