Thanks, I have also been trying to do this for some time now, and this is mainly work in progress that I have been applying to some of my Rails projects.

There are some edges I would like to clean out, preferably with input from others

Thanks!

It seems a more sophisticated approach like yours is required to achieve that holy grail.

Yes, that is a concern I have: each page having a different URL, rendering another uncached HTTP request…

But my aproach is this:
- you should abstract as much as you can and put the bulk of your CSS onto a global stylesheet. Taking this aproach your 20K seams like a lot for the page-specific CSS…
- you should try and reuse templates and partials as much as possible. Try to use partial layouts, etc.

Also note that if the rendered templates are the same but on a different order, the URL will be the same.

Having said that, the problem you presented is something I have been thinking about. There are some ways to get through it:

- pre-generate a stylesheet containing all the glued stylesheets
- declare stylesheet groups (template groups) that you use can later refer to.

Any ideas?

Let’s say I’m working with a large, complex application, with a 10 “glued” styled_objects (which is fairly conservative, I think). If these are mixed and matched with different page loads, I could easily several dozen versions of my compiled stylsheets. Why would I make my client re-download a new complied stylesheet for every page? If you figure an average 20kb per gziped stylesheet/page. That adds up to a lot of extra overhead.