RFC: Add ignore strategies

[KevinBatdorf]

Would resolve #90

Just a concept for how we could handle not showing some components, or not loading at all.

Since you don't necessarily bundle Alpine, or the functions Alpine uses, identifying production mode doesn't seem possible.

We could just leave it up to the user to manage visibility.

[HugoDF]

I wonder if the "production mode" is useful.

At the end of the day, the devtools don't load unless you inspect the page. Since we're client-side, switching a global variable before opening devtools seems easy enough (so if some did have production mode on, you can switch off trivially)

About the devtools-ignore directive I wonder about the education piece, devtools aren't really meant to have docs, they should just give you a UI that allows you to inspect your components. Anything that you can't guide users to with the UI is going to be difficult to gain traction on.

I still think adding a way to hide the components from the panel is going to give the best outcome in terms of ease of use, education/discoverability and implementation.

We could even persist which components are hidden across refreshes/reloads using https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/storage (which we already request permission for)

[KevinBatdorf]

We could also do both and just not document it. Anyone curious enough would probably end up here via a Google search. I'm ok if we don't though. maybe let's see if anyone ends up here and comments on it. I can open a discussion post this week about it.

One advantage of disabling it all together though is it doesn't initialize anything. Or does Chrome wait until the tab has focus?

I do think we should add the filtering regardless. It's a big project though I think.

[HugoDF]

We could also do both and just not document it. Anyone curious enough would probably end up here via a Google search. I'm ok if we don't though. maybe let's see if anyone ends up here and comments on it. I can open a discussion post this week about it.

One advantage of disabling it all together though is it doesn't initialize anything. Or does Chrome wait until the tab has focus?

I do think we should add the filtering regardless. It's a big project though I think.

Backend.js doesn't get injected until the devtools are opened so no init unless you've got devtools open.

I think we can have a default filter on devtools-ignore but it should be discoverable through the UI (with something like the React settings popup) the popup doesn't need to let you change anything maybe just mention you can ignore things with that attribute, that's probably a good compromise between where we are and where we want to go?

You can see what I'm thinking of in #111, for now we can have some text about being able to ignore components using x-devtools-ignore or whatever and down the line we can switch out the icon and make it a setting panel

[HugoDF]

🤔 the above answer about how the extension works probably should go into a contributing.md