I have a plugin that creates a shortcode and requires a JavaScript file and a CSS file to load on any page that contains that shortcode. I could just make the script/style load on all pages, but that's not the best practice. I only want to load the files on pages that call the shortcode. I've found two methods of doing this, but both have problems.
Method 1 sets a flag to true inside the shortcode handler function, and then checks that value inside a wp_footer callback. If it's true, it uses wp_print_scripts() to load the JavaScript. The problem with this is that it only works for JavaScript and not CSS, because CSS should be declared inside <head>, which you can only do during an early hook like init or wp_head.
Method 2 fires early and "peeks ahead" to see if the shortcode exists in the current page content. I like this method much better than the first, but the problem with it it won't detect if the template calls do_shortcode().
So, I'm leaning towards using the second method and then trying to detect if a template is assigned, and if so, parse it for the shortcode. Before I do that, though, I wanted to check if anyone know of a better method.