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by basique 991 days ago
Why is it a wrong abstraction?
1 comments

It assumes a lot of things:

- Submitting a form results in an immediate network request (offline-first apps, hello?)

- The network event is HTTP-based

- The network event is REST

- The payload is contained within the... markup (like why?)

- What about network requests that are not CRUD? If your API is designed propperly, that should be most of the endpoints. Do you make dummy forms for them? How?

The point of htmx is to be able to do the interactivity on the server, so using it with your existing, general API isn't really the point - the backend (or, well, frontend backend?) just serves the needed data directly in the markup. This isn't really ideal if you think of your site as a separate frontend/backend, but it makes sense if you already have a backend and don't want to make an API just to then write JS that consumes the API and shows you stuff. Granted, this doesn't really work well with offline-first apps, but it's nice if you need to actually poke the server whenever you need to do something.