[silver-arrow]

Yes indeed! The core aspect, however, is that your server is returning fragments of html that htmx places in the DOM extremely quickly. They have pretty good examples on their site illustrating some "modern" UI patterns.

As an example, you may have an HTML table on your page that you want to insert a new row for some reason on let's say a button click. You place some attributes that htmx understands on your button that will call for the TR HTML chunk from the server. You can imagine replacing all the rows for a paging click etc.

Again check out the example for cool stuff.

[robertoandred]

Sounds pretty slow. At least a second before the UI responds to any action?

[BizarreByte]

It’s much faster than that in practice, but of course it comes down to how well your backend is written. I’ve been using HTMX lately and I can blink and miss the UI updates.

I wish I had numbers, but in my experience it’s far better than you’d expect. Basically take the length of a REST call you’d have to make anyway and add a few milliseconds for the rendering.

It won’t be the right choice in all cases, but it’s a great option in many.

[amelius]

> but of course it comes down to how well your backend is written

Also the latency of your connection matters.

[BizarreByte]

I thought frontend devs stopped caring about bad connections years ago? ;)

HTMX is fine with showing loading icons are the like if needed, but yah, connection latency is going to have an effect.

[throwawaymaths]

It seems such a waste... You're chucking all that cryptography (ssl, encrypted cookies) away only to be redone every. single. Dom change

[movedx]

Huh? How does HTMLx "chuck" away SSL (you meant TLS, right? I hope you're not using SSL) and encrypted cookies?

How about you try it and see?

[devin]

It’s fine to use SSL interchangeably with TLS IMO. It’s still called OpenSSL.

[movedx]

I suppose, but it's not really that big of an effort to just use the correct term for the correct version of the technology.

[throwawaymaths]

By chuck away I mean all those processor cycles to perform cryptographic verification... And then throw away the result because you have to do it on the next connect anyways

And I have written a library that does the full SSL handshake/upgrade cycle off of tcp sockets, and managed my own private CA, so I'm not a total idiot.

[kaba0]

How is that different than all the other CSR SPAs that do a REST call on every button press as well? They do almost the same amount of work, and will also “throw away” the results.

[dan1234]

Isn’t that mitigated with TLS session resumption and TLS 1.3’s 0-RTT?

[silver-arrow]

You for sure wouldn't want to build a spreadsheet type app with htmx because of that aspect. Many other types of web apps can benefit from the simplification of the architecture, however. And like my paging example, many times you need to go to the server anyway. But sure, like anything, I wouldn't use htmx for every situation.

[silver-arrow]

True BizarreByte. I love how htmx let's you easily add animation indicators on actions, because many times it's too fast due to the small chunks coming back and getting placed so quickly in the DOM

[berkle4455]

What sort of slow backends do you work with? My PHP htmx application responds in ~30ms including network transmit. Even if you’re across an ocean it’s maybe 300ms.

[b4je7d7wb]

300ms feedback on user action is unacceptable. But I read another comment saying there can be loading indicators so in that case its fine.

[mixmastamyk]

Same as a javascript round trip. Can still make local-only changes if you'd like.

[dmitrygr]

How well does their example work over satellite internet with 1.2sec latency? How about my cell connection when T-mobile throttles me to 64Kbps for going over my data allowance? How about my sister's cell connection, as she is on an MVNO and deprioritized sometimes to 128Kbps, sometimes to 6Mbps, and sometimes it varies within a minute between those two?

FFS, people, learn to write proper software that does everything locally!

[simonw]

All of the environments you describe there sound to me like they would benefit from web apps that become responsive after an initial page load of less than 100KB, followed by ~10KB round trips to the server to fetch additional data.

As opposed to the >2MB initial page loads that have become so common with heavy React SPAs in exchange for the theoretical benefits of avoiding more page loads for further interactions.

[dmitrygr]

They benefit from a .exe (or a .tar.gz or a .apk) downloaded when convenient and run locally

[camdenreslink]

Any app with dynamic data would still need to make some sort of HTTP request before rendering some view with that new data. I don’t really get your point.

[hem777]

If the data is also local, which it can be and in many cases should be, there’s no network request round trip.

[flangola7]

My mentor always taught "Program as if it has to run on the far side of Mars."

Software that doesn't need the internet for its function shouldn't connect to the internet. Software that does need the internet should be able to operate under adverse network conditions.

The Voyager probes are 160 AU away, far past Pluto, with a roundtrip latency of 37 hours. The radio transmitter onboard is only about 10x more powerful than a cell phone. The hardware has been in the cold vacuum and hard radiation of space for four and half decades. In spite of this, NASA maintains active two-way communication with it today, and continues to receive scientific telemety data of the outer solar system.

I don't expect web devs to design for deep space, but the core functionality of a website should still work for a rural user with a spotty satellite uplink. Don't do go loading JavaScript or other resource calls until the basics are received. I still remember the days of Facebook being fully functional on a 2G cellular connection, using little or nothing more than static HTML and CSS (and that was before the magic tricks HTML5 can do).

[kaba0]

And what kind of apps are you using? You think Amazon and whatever else doesn’t also start a rest call on basically every action, many of which are “blocking” the UX?