Exactly the approach I’m taking at the moment. I’ve got a small prototype built out with Drab to check the premise works well for my use-case, but beyond that; I’m leaving anything frontend for the time being.
I prefer dividing my work in backend and frontend “sprints” anyway…
I can completely appreciate not giving definitive dates. I’m very much of the ‘it’s done when it’s done’ brigade. If it hasn’t yet been released, I’m sure there’s a reason for it.
All I’m really holding out for at this stage is a rough-ish timeline. Like - are there a bunch of pretty massive features that still need implementing, or is it cosmetic stuff? Are there parts of Phoenix that a release is blocking on? Does Chris want to align LV’s release with, say, Phoenix 1.5? Having some idea would make planning commercial projects / selling it to other team members that much easier.
Of course, none of this is directly Chris’ concern, nor should third parties factor into/pressure a release timetable. It’d just be useful to know!
Hopefully doesn’t come to that. In my current project, LV all but eradicates client-side JS. With React being quite an opinionated view layer that tends to bundle both mark-up and business logic, refactoring to LV later would be tantamount to a rewrite in my case. So React isn’t really an ideal plan B this time around.
Instead of an SPA, I’ll prob stick with plain HTML and a thin JS layer on top. Hopefully that’ll be a bit easier to refactor for LV when it lands.
Phoenix 1.4 is out 
He has not said so, in fact he’s said we’ll see LV after 1.4 so I would take that as not wanting to wait till 1.5.
This is why I reckon it won’t be too long before we see LV 
(though this is just a guess like everyone else’s 
)
Perhaps it has not been a concern since the mid-2000s for most front-end JS devs 
. For security-conscious individuals though, disabling JS and re-enabling only as needed is an easy way to prevent all kinds of undesirable garbage from executing on one’s computer. When a website depends on 30 different scripts, and I only need to enable 2 of them to get full functionality of the site, why waste my local machine’s resources to execute the other 28 scripts that are just there to track you and who knows what else?
This was discussed at length in a JS thread that split from this one, and has since been deleted, so I won’t go into the technical counter points again for the sake of re-opening a can of worms.
But suffice to summarise that the vast majority (99%+) don’t share your browsing habits, so commercially designing for a ROI on the remaining fraction is often not worth doing.
In terms of dev-hours I’d agree that for most web apps today it isn’t worth it to put much effort into design for users with JS disabled beyond some basic graceful degradation, especially for fancy stuff like graphs / charts. I think this is partly the fault of our tools though - one thing about LiveView that seems interesting is the potential to make it easier to fallback to server-side-rendering only.
I realize this probably is not a priority for the project especially in the beginning, but it’s certainly interesting to think about giving devs an easier fallback path without requiring a ton of extra work.
I had an example of how a fallback might work in the deleted JS thread, but it got really messy, fast.
The problem is, there’s no real substitute for the JS API in the absence of JS. Let’s say an onClick handler is attached to a (non-submitted) button that should send a GraphQL request via a WebSocket, get some data, and update the local state which in turn refreshes the DOM without a full page reload. How do you simulate that in plain HTML? Form handlers won’t work - you’d need to explicitly submit a form by either hitting inside <input> tags, or click a button with type=submit. Even then, you’re limited to POST data, which would mean preserving some kind of state. This was the domain of ASP.NET view state, years back, and even that (IIRC) required some level of JS buy-in.
Unless you’re doing the absolute most basics - submitting forms, and clicking <a> links - there’s really no ‘graceful degradation’ these days for even rudimentary parity with basic app expectations.
JS is 99%+ supported, by default. No plugins, no workarounds - it works in 995 out of 1,000+ visits. For those other 5 out of 1,000 edge cases, you need to make a business decision as to a) why those users have JS disabled and b) whether there’s a ROI working around it.
I’d argue that for the majority of cases, in all but very few exceptions, a simple message asking users to enable JS would be sufficient.
As I said elsewhere, not once in the last 10 years of building anything for online (across many verticals, covering many demographies and geographies) have I ever encountered a scenario where it was necessary to design for a non-JS environment. This has nothing to do with designing Javascript properly, btw. There are plenty of examples of where it’s done badly. But done right - with good asset loading strategies, minification, and efficient code that won’t kill resource-constrained devices, there has been zero occasions where a customer/user has ever written in to complain that the site/app required JS support.
If there’s a need to consume parts of your site/app outside of JS, that’s what REST endpoints are for.
It’s just not a design consideration today. Back in 1998 when I started, absolutely it was a concern. Even in the mid-2000s, when JS support was patchy and non-standard, there was an argument for it. But in 2019, when virtually every mainstream web browser released in the last decade has it enabled by default? This is an old problem that really doesn’t warrant workarounds, for all but the slimmest of use-cases.
(Apologies @AstonJ if this risks repeating the previous JS thread… this is intended to conclude the point rather than branch off into a separate discussion!)
If JS is disabled the client still gets the initial HTML render (no white screen of death) but no live updating as the channel/LV process won’t be subsequently instantiated.
I can’t find it now but I thought he mentioned in this podcast if you were just doing a form you could write a fallback where it POSTs to a controller without needing form state held in the LV process. Of course then you’d need extra code to render the validation error messages server-side after the POST. I doubt any use-case more complex than a standard form is possible with JS disabled.
Not corporate, but government here. ^.^;
Although my last job (very much big corporate) had some terminals super locked down like that too though.
Not uncommon in my experiences… ^.^;
On my own devices I use uMatrix though, I like fine-grained whitelisting. Can’t recommend it enough! ^.^
Depends on who it’s being made for. And it definitely doesn’t hurt to keep ADA compliance in mind anymore as it’s been hitting some places hard lately!
+1
That is why should always ‘start’ with the basics so you know they work, then just ‘enhance’ after that with whatever pretty things or special features or so. Like I use GraphQL, but not on the client-page side. ^.^
Honestly such messages are amazingly rude to people that use screen readers. I saw one here go off on a rant once… >.>
Eh, you really aren’t that demographic though, that doesn’t make the demographic that you are in the entire world though. Working at a college really shows me how very important it is to have proper fallbacks (I didn’t really care either before here to be honest…).
Eh, it’s not an “old” thing (although I am stuck on GUI-less consoles quite often) for most, but rather a compliance thing so it is actually useful. People with visual and/or motor disabilities are far far more common than one would think. 
Yes I thought I recalled the comment on the client getting an initial HTML render, which would be wonderful as far as I’m concerned. I wasn’t sure if I had heard that correctly though, like if it was in Chris’ video or in that Elixir Mix episode or elsewhere.
Either way I’m pretty stoked to mess around with this thing. It’s great how much focus there has generally been lately in the community around creating interfaces (scenic etc).