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Comment by pault | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: if liveView does catch on in a big way, what will the front end developers do? I can't see the huge FED community going back to writing HTML and CSS templates. I wonder if that resistance will hurt adoption.

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They'll have to start thinking of themselves as "developers", not just "frontend developers". Boxing yourself into one specific type of software development is a bad idea given how the industry changes so rapidly and dramatically. Flexibility is key to long term success.

LiveView is great for writing form validations or simple admin stuff. Even though the examples show that you can do 60fps animations, it is not the intended use case, you're not going to write anything that needs small latency or that needs a ton of processing using LiveView, front end developers are fine.

Even in very simple CRUD projects I have to write a few hundred lines of Javascript to enhance the UI. Stuff like: if you check this box 4 more options appear. Or here is an autocomplete field/dropdown that autofills in 4 other form fields. A lot of basic stuff that cannot be done with raw HTML alone. I can see how something like LiveView would replace the need for mucking around with jQuery when your project doesn't need a big and heavy SPA framework.

Hiding things with unchecked checkboxes, at least, can be done entirely in simple CSS.

  .optional {
      display: none;
  }
  input:checked ~ .optional {
      display: inherit;
  }

I've recently adopted two libraries for my server-side backend app:

1. unpoly to handle common JS behaviours (such as show this div when this checkbox is selected)

2. Web components to handle more complex pieces of UI while maintaining compatibility with LiveView: rendering a functional jQuery carousel via LiveView/Websockets is much harder than just pushing a <carousel> element through the socket. Admittedly I haven't tested if the DOM diffing library LiveView uses plays nice with web components.

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