All my scripts and css are compress, merged and then gzipped and served from s3. This is all done via a task each time I deploy my app.
I don't have any problems with it. What are the problems, i don't understand?
Oh, so it's a compressor issue. A lot of the compressors I was experimenting with produced bad JS, especially with more advanced JS. The compressed js is also prone to errors just because of the fact that javascript is such a flexible language (not rigid in it's syntax).
It's not hard to try out the results in all the browser/os combinations or FF/IE/S on windows/osx. It just seems like what you're saying is a cop-out.
Anyways, I suggest using dojo compressor.
Eggie5, you mention serving your css and js files from S3. I tried that before and it really slowed my site down. I served it by setting config.action_controller.asset_host = my.s3.bucket in config/ environment/production.rb. How are you serving these files?
When my deploy script runs, just builds the string path for the css file and inserts it into the rhtml page as html.
OH, and it's also CRITICAL that when you upload the files to s3 that you set the content-types to text/javascript and text/css respectively or else when they're severed they will be ignored by in certain circumstances.