I have some tracking pixels on our site, that I'd like to protect against them impacting our user experience if their servers are down or slow. What's the easiest way to specify a maximum time the browser should attempt to load a given img - i.e. try for 100ms and then give up? (I'd rather not track a given customer than have a server hang on the third-party server impact our site).
you should load them when the document is ready. or at the lastline ( in the html). this way- it wont hurt the user experience. document ready can be also used with jQuery.
but you can use window.load.
as a rule(not always) - all scripts should be at the end of the page.
if you want to FORCE time out KILL :
create an img tag.
attach the load event to the img (this function will set flag : downloaded=1;)
set the src.
with setTimeout Function your gonna kill the img.
how ?
if after X MS the downloaded ==0 then kill.
so : each load event( from the IMg) is setting a flag ( downloaded=1).
your timeout function dont care about nothing!!! after x MS she going to kill the img - only if the downloaded==0.
You could call a server process in the IMG tag. Let it worry about timing out the load.
You would have to use javascript to do this, there's nothing native to HTML/HTTP that would do this on a page basis. Google around for "HTML IMG timeout".