I am still trying to understand your perspective. If webpack is all that you care in a framework, what is preventing you from adopting it in this new release?
cvkmohan
chrismccord
Creator of Phoenix
For posterity for others – the way folks choose to engage in a conversation really matters. Given two paths for improved gaps in docs (which is the entire point of a release candidate to find bugs/docs issues), which path is better? Finding issues with optional tooling when evaluating if it suits your needs then completely dismissing the work of others, or stating your alternative solution works better for you, but offering up the gaps you found in documentation for improvement? Both get us to better 1.6.0 final documentation, but one leaves maintainers discouraged and puts others work down unnecessarily, while providing negative value to the conversation.
51
Qqwy
TypeCheck Core Team
Congradulations on the release! 
The new features look very interesting.
Having a single rendering engine/syntax is a big step forward over having both LiveEEx as well as (plain) EEx with their slight variation in syntax and semantics. I’m very stoked about this development!
Are you imagining that the HTML-awareness of HEEx might also help to improve LiveView’s diffing algorithm further (better fingerprinting, improved change tracking, maybe reduce the need for a manual ‘id’ option to track children), or will it remain a ‘plain text’ layer?
0
chrismccord
Creator of Phoenix
We can add the ids and such at compile time, so there is benefit there, but not really in terms of the diffing. Diffing-wise, one area today where we could be smarter is diffing tag attributes. For example if you add a tailwind class to a bunch of other static classes, we have to re-send the entire attribute value. I could also see things in the future like css class purging and what not helping the overall bites-over-the-wire story since we could be aware of al the classes used in all heex templates. Many libraries already do this like purgecss with regexes, but neat to think about doing it within HEEx integrations.
15
njwest
Really excited about this release, looking forward to playing around with HEEx and an included swoosh setup. Thank you Chris, José, and the rest of the Phoenix team for this amazing piece of free software!
Coming from a NodeJS background, it seems both insane and ideal to me to not have webpack included. I’d love to leave webpack behind forever to be honest. Upgrading to the latest TailwindCSS and webpack 5 took me half a workday of frustration, as webpack config is not intuitive and has to be completely rewritten/restructured with every version upgrade, usually with the aid of 5-10 stackoverflow posts and github issues.
esbuild looks very promising, even though it is less than a year old at press time (which could be an advantage if our community engages with its development). I’m guessing esbuild may not yet have full webpack capabilities, but here’s hoping it pushes the JS ecosystem in a more sane direction.
9
RoyalMist
Congrats to all contributors, still improving my elixir skills and hope to become contributor soon 
2
APB9785
Creator of ECSx
I’m using the step-by-step upgrade guide to bring an existing application from 1.5 to 1.6; after updating the deps and switching from html.leex to html.heex, I’m getting errors like this for all my forms:
unmatched closing tag. Expected </div> for <div> at line 51, got: </form>
where an example form might look like:
<div class="flex mt-6 mb-8">
<%= f = form_for @changeset, "#",
phx_submit: "move_items",
phx_target: @myself %>
<div>
<%= select f, :category_id, @category_select, prompt: "Move to list" %>
<%= submit "Move" %>
</div>
</form>
</div>
Is this expected? I noticed a new syntax in the docs like <.form> </.form> but is that now required for heex?
0
Sebb
catra
Hey gang, any chance to have a reference on how to add font-awesome to a Phoenix project using this release. I tried many ways but not luck yet. A couple weeks ago I was able to add it to a previous Phoenix version by following this tutorial, but now that we are substituting webpack the way is different. Thanks in advance.
0
cvkmohan
You would want to try the excellent GitHub - miguel-s/ex_fontawesome: Font Awesome for Phoenix, Phoenix LiveView and Surface · GitHub. It is meant for LiveView and Surface.
1