Proposal: Refrain from using "DeadView", endorse an alternative

[JonRowe]

I’ve always referred to it as a static view or static pass to disambiguate, the docs use similar language calling it the static page before we connect, but I also sort of like plain view even if it has a “plain old ruby object” feel to it…

[rhcarvalho]

@ErikNaslund

One of the few things I dislike about Phoenix is that I have to make the choice between LiveView and DeadView when I start creating a new page, and it’s a bit of work “switching” from a DeadView to a LiveView later on once I realize that I need it. I also need to understand and remember both the DeadView and LiveView way of doing certain things. There’s also the fact that when I’m writing helper functions I need to think about a lot more things like “am I receiving a conn or a socket here”, to be able to support both DeadView and LiveView. My ideal Phoenix incarnation would only have View, and it would be most similar to what we currently call LiveView

Could we have a LiveView that could be told to not perform the websocket connection for example? (just as a silly idea). I’m sure a lot of people have considered the plausability of this…and I’d love to read more about it!

Related thread: LiveView: Feature to "cancel" second render - #26 by rhcarvalho

[hubertlepicki]

yeah, and if the LiveView actions supported HTTP methods, we have a full replacement for Phoenix Controllers, I think.

[kamaroly]

Static and liveview would do it for me.

[garrison]

For the record, I actually quite like “dead view”. It’s short (one syllable, matches “live”) and the meaning is obvious (opposite of “live”). The best term tends to be the one that catches on naturally within a community (e.g. early Twitter users coining “tweet”).

It would be nice if Live/Dead views were to converge on the same patterns, though. LiveView’s provenance as a “separate” library within Phoenix has created a lot of UX issues which have slowly been cleaned up as time has gone on (1.7 was a big improvement, and heex/component functionality has been nicely unified).

Finding a way to ditch controllers and the double render would take us 99% of the way there, I think. Obviously neither of those will be easy.

[thiagomajesk]

@garrison

It would be nice if Live/Dead views were to converge on the same patterns, though. LiveView’s provenance as a “separate” library within Phoenix has created a lot of UX issues

Yeah, to me, this is the crux of the matter, not the terminology.

I think Hologram (https://hologram.page/) is going in the right direction with the concept of “pages” which feels a bit more nicely connected than Phoenix/ LiveView today. At the same time, I wonder if both maintainers had the chance to cooperate at some point instead of splitting efforts because both have pretty good ideas.

PS.: Not to completely sidetrack this discussion but I have this recurring thought about Chris sunsetting Phoenix to focus completely on LiveView as the “engine” that powers client and server live interactions. Maybe that would leave room for some innovation.