Any way to prevent external javascript includes from slowing your page

loading time?

[HughMungus]

I have one advertiser's javascript include which is really simple, but, is slowing down the load time for my site (the site says "done" in the status bar but sitll takes a few seconds after that to be displayed). I've heard that this kind of thing can be mitigated somehow (though I didn't find anything in a search of this forum).

Can something be done to make the page loading not dependent on the javascript include loading first or is it a case where all the includes have to be processed first? Alternatively, is there a way to tell the server to skip an include if it's taking more than X time to load?

[jollymcfats]

Have you tried placing defer in the script tag? It might help.

<script type="text/javascript" src="..." defer>

I'd assume that the XHTML equiv. would be defer="defer", but that's just a guess.