Thread:Extension talk:VisualEditor/Can't get the VisualEditor to start/reply

I notice that in VisualEditor\VisualEditor.php there is an external cmd section with node stuff. I have node installed on the wiki host, but I can't get all the Parsoid modules installed - contextify issue - which is why it's on a separate host. The documentation reads as if VE should still load and work in a read-only way w/o node or Parsoid though. Is this correct?