More refined transition configuration

Hi! Thank you for this good lib that can replace the good old Barba.js! I’m seeing a use case that Highway cannot cover:

Let’s assume you have this website architecture:

[home]–[about]–[contact]

–> It might be interesting to have the ability to have a different ‘in’ transition of the about page depending on where you are coming from.

For example, here is a ‘cheap’ but simple use case (like a slider):

• If you come from ‘home’, you want that the ‘about’ page slides in from the right.
• If you come from ‘contact’, you want that the ‘about’ page slides in from the left.

Here is a suggestion about the config:

new Highway.Core({
  renderers,
  transitions: {
    default: Fade,
    home: Home,
    contact: Contact,
    about: {
      home: aboutHome,
      contact: aboutContact,
    },
  }
});

Or simpler: You just provide additional params in in and out methods of a class Transition. For example, an object as follow:

{
  from: 'home',
  to: 'about',
};

PS: The prefetch option was interesting on Barba.js. Are you planing to implement it? 😃

[Anthodpnt]

Hi @Michkkael,

Thanks for the suggestion! You’re right it might be interesting to extend the transition feature and cover even more use cases. We’ll think about it for the v2.0.0 that’s in beta for now and keep you in touch.

About the prefetching, it’s really the worst way of doing it in Barba.js. It doesn’t make sense to prefetch a page when a user hovers un link since users might hover links either by mistake or without clicking them. This means you’re doing HTTP requests without being a bit sure the user will do anything.

Another more efficient way to do it would be to use a library like Premonish to try to predict if the user intent to click an element or not based on the intention score.

The problem is that it would add an extra layer of weight and complexity to our library that we want to keep simple to use. So we are not closing the door this the prefetch feature but it needs time to be done intelligently and efficiently. We will think about it for a later major release maybe.

Best regards, Anthodpnt

[mikehwagz]

I would also really love a feature like this. I’ve achieved something similar using Barba.js (described here), but similar to Highway, the correct transition can only be determined after the new view is fetched, and I understand it is not ideal to make the user wait for the fetch to complete before beginning the transition out.

I wanted to chime in here since this is somewhat related to our discussion regarding overlapping transitions as both features would require the new view to be fetched before beginning the transition out.