Tags: turbolinks

The Origin of Stimulus

I really like the look of this markup-driven JavaScript library from the same people who brought us the pjax library Turbolinks.

The philosophy behind these tools matches my own philosophy (which I think is one of the most important factors in choosing a tool that works for you, not against you).

turbolinks/turbolinks: Turbolinks makes navigating your web application faster

I really, really like the approach that this JavaScript library is taking in treating Ajax as a progressive enhancement:

Turbolinks intercepts all clicks on a href links to the same domain. When you click an eligible link, Turbolinks prevents the browser from following it. Instead, Turbolinks changes the browser’s URL using the History API, requests the new page using XMLHttpRequest, and then renders the HTML response.

During rendering, Turbolinks replaces the current body element outright and merges the contents of the head element. The JavaScript window and document objects, and the HTML html element, persist from one rendering to the next.

Here’s the mustard it’s cutting:

It depends on the HTML5 History API and Window.requestAnimationFrame. In unsupported browsers, Turbolinks gracefully degrades to standard navigation.

This approach matches my own mental model for building on the web—I might try playing around with this on some of my projects.