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by _gabe_ 944 days ago
I don’t understand why you’re bringing HTMX into this? This is a blog about HTML first, and the comment I originally responded too seemed to imply a more traditional MVC or SSR site was the way to go. It feels like you’re just searching for a “gotcha” argument at this point and not arguing in good faith.

My whole argument can be succinctly summed up by this comment from a different Hacker News user from when React was first announced:

> One of the biggest problems with the web platform is that we've spent the last 20 years trying to shim applications into a document framework. HTML was designed to help academics share research papers, not to replace native thick-client applications, yet that's the direction it's been evolving towards.

> I'm really happy to see Web Components (inc. Polymer, Angular, x-tags, and React) landing into HTML. If we accept that web apps != web pages at a spec level, hopefully we can build an awesome platform on which to create tools that leverage all the great parts of the web (linkable, available, auto-updating, device-agnostic) without the mess that we've made trying to make the web do something it wasn't designed for.[0]

This sentiment, after 10 years, is still spot on. The web isn’t academics sharing research papers anymore. Interactive web apps, whether you like it or not, require a ton of client side state management. React was developed to address concerns with managing that state and improving performance where HTML5 fell short. It still succeeds at that.

Of course, if you have a static site, don’t use React! But let’s not pretend there’s no use case for it either. There’s tradeoffs. And I’ll repeat that til the end of time. No matter what you choose, there’s tradeoffs.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5789055

1 comments

> I don’t understand why you’re bringing HTMX into this?

Maybe because HTMX fits all the principles listed by the author? Or because it's specifically referenced in the article (3 times)?