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Turbolinks is great for some use-cases (like Basecamp for example). But it is not for everybody. It absolutely sucks for other use-cases.

Among other things, since its inception it has messed with the CSS heirarchy, resulting in the fact that by default it loads all the CSS and JavaScript for all pages, in an order you probably don't want. (Note: there is a reason the "C" in CSS stands for "Cascading". It wasn't designed to all be loaded at once.)

If you DO want "one page apps", then fine. If you don't, and you have a significant site with more than a couple of dissimilar pages, it will probably be more performant if you disable Turbolinks and load only the JavaScript and CSS necessary for a given page, i.e., the conventional approach.

discuss

aantix|9 years ago

"will probably be more performant"..? How much more performant?

"sucks for other use cases"? Which use cases have you use TurboLinks where it wasn't a good fit?

Basecamp isn't a trivial one page app; it has over 200+ screens.

For page changes, CSS is generally scoped by controller action classes. Quick look up by the browser, penalty negligible.

All of the JS is loaded, but again, you can invoke the needed js for the page by looking at the body/action selector. Again, a few if checks on the "page:change" callback.

Weighed against the traditional: a full request to the server which includes a download of relevant CSS for the page, a download of relevant javascript for the page, parsing of that css, parsing of js, and then execution of that js.

AnneOminous|9 years ago

1) The use-cases in which not all JavaScript or CSS is (or should be) loaded up front. There are many such. You should be able to think of several just off-hand. I can.

2) "Basecamp isn't a trivial one page app; it has over 200+ screens." I didn't say it was. Read again. However, Basecamp IS written in such a way as to heavily rely on Turbolinks.

3) "For page changes, CSS is generally scoped by controller action classes. Quick look up by the browser, penalty negligible." Not in our tests with Rails 4.2.

4) "All of the JS is loaded." Yep. The rest of your sentence is not relevant to my point.

You seem to think my objection was that there is some kind of difficulty accessing specific CSS/JavaScript under Turbolinks. Nothing of the sort. Rather the opposite, really: it was that there is too much loaded, specifically in ways that disrupt standard CSS hierarchy.

Obviously that can be compensated for by scoping. That wasn't my point. The point was that IT WORKS DIFFERENTLY THAN THE STANDARD CSS HIERARCHY. Understand?

"Weighed against the traditional: a full request to the server which includes a download of relevant CSS for the page, a download of relevant javascript for the page, parsing of that css, parsing of js, and then execution of that js."

There are times when that is desirable over having that CSS and JS always loaded. I get that you don't seem to be able to think of any, but we've encountered many.

I'm not going to get into an argument with you here about which is "better". Which you seem to want. I simply said there are use cases that are appropriate to each.