Your approach is fine and I might personally even prefer it, and Phoenix will allow you to do both. But speaking from experience, whenever the module structure did not reflect the file structure in Phoenix, people would strongly dislike that too. So some people would expect your code to define Page.PageController, Page.PageHTML and so on, which is of course too verbose. And defining only Page.Controller leads to other sorts of ambiguity (imagine trying to a find a given Controller alias).

In other words, you can/should go for it. But I suspect if we had gone with it, we would have folks asking to change it to the current one. YMMV.

As someone who is not a particularly big fan of colocated files I like this as it’s more “package-y” (which I do like).

I guess the more classic Elixir-y way would be like:

app_web
├── controllers
│   ├── page_controller
│   │   ├── page_html
│   │   └── page_html.ex
│   └── page_controller.ex

For what it’s worth—since this is something that generally gets to me especially since it feels like there is a bit of a push towards it—I really dislike this manner of colocation because I only ever use tree browsers to get a sense of the structure. When I see the flat colocation structure, it’s incredibly noisy (which I believe is what you’re getting).

This is because if I think of an application general tree structure (talking module tree, not file tree), controllers are an entry point then drill down into their views. I think we’re past the world of “shared views” because we now have components so there is no reason to want to see a giant list of views.

To go further down the bike sheddy rabbit hole, I really like the “classic” pattern of foo.ex colocated with a foo/ directory. I’ve worked with people and seen recent projects that don’t do this, and I understand the distaste (digging into Rust lately I’ve seen cargo programmatically allows both styles) but when it comes to glancing a file tree, it’s really nice seen bare files as entry points and then if there are supporting files, I know that because there is a related directory. And then if I see a directory with no bare .ex file, well, I don’t know what that is off the bat but I know it’s something to be considered different.

Anyway, that last paragraph was super bike-sheddy but I just appreciate your post.

Ya, I do also like what you proposed, Elixir-y way.