[recursivedoubts]

I have thrown together a minimalist extension to HTML that I think captures the core ideas of htmx, although you are right that there are still some outstanding issues that probably need additional thinking to make it widely useful:

https://gist.github.com/1cg/d1ad1ddd5f43a8a993cd9f711135edc9

Here is an example button using these proposed extensions to HTML

  <button href="/example"
        method="patch"
        target="#divToReplace"
        onClick="this.submit()">
    This is an example button hypermedia control
  </button>

[flir]

I'd vote for being able to put an href attribute on any element (eg <div href=""> and <span href="">), and maybe binning <a> entirely. That seems like such an obvious enhancement to me, I figure there's probably a deep reason it hasn't been done.

[chiefalchemist]

Not sure of why it was done then, but currently for accessibility a link says, "This takes you to another page / URL" while a button says, "This performs some action / triggers some event."

If everything and anything is clickable, how does technology that supports accessibility handle that? Note: This isn't a way-a-figure-you-fool question. Not at all. It's a sincere question in the sense that accessibility matters, we can't forget that. So if we change, how can we be certain accessibility isn't left behind?

[flir]

Yeah, I wondered if it was accessibility, or maybe a limitation to support text browsers.

To take the opposite view, there's not much we can't wrap in an <a> since HTML5 (eg <a href=""><div></div></a> is valid, and makes the div clickable). How do accessible browsers support that today?

[candiddevmike]

So you want to inline JavaScript, similar to CSS and the `style` attribute?

[recursivedoubts]

I would prefer something more like what htmx has in hx-trigger:

https://htmx.org/attributes/hx-trigger/

w/ an explicit and declarative syntax, but that attribute is fairly involved

this was a brief exercise in thinking about the minimal changes necessary to HTML to support something like htmx, and unfortunately there isn't any attribute that maps to hx-trigger in the same way there is for other htmx attributes, so I resorted to the on* attributes + generalizing the submit() function on forms.

[Spivak]

Yes and no. You wouldn't call a <form> inlining JS while it does come with some degree of interaction. It would be an expansion of HTML to include a few new things to (ideally) enable a wider rage of lightly-interactive websites to be HTML only.