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	by ledgerdev 823 days ago
	I used htmx to build a now in production multi-step payment form that's currently in use by several hundred thousand people per month. It's been great, but not perfect and I would say a less well trodden path to get the edge cases right. I would absolutely say it's been a simpler overall solution for us as a small team than a full js client side framework would have been. Things that were hard to get right were setting up loading indicators, error display, keeping step/form state on browser history back/forward, tab sleep restoration after htmx navigation(especially tricky), and injection of third party form elements that had to be injected/remove and re-injected on back/forward between steps. I would be surprised if these sorts of edge cases weren't already handled by a popular js-frameworks but can't say for sure. The site load is very fast and we haven't even rolled out client side js validation on forms the server validation responds so fast. We are planning to use more htmx across other apps at present, so overall positive hypermedia for the win.

2 comments

tomcam 823 days ago

Super balanced & informative writeup, thank you. Can you tell me what you mean by tab sleep restoration?

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ledgerdev 823 days ago

Last year chrome started discarding background tabs to save memory, probably should have said discard rather then sleep it's been a while since I worked on that. Our user base keeps tabs in background often in mobile devices and we saw some reports of it. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-auto...

When you do an htmx navigation to a new page, a discarded tab will "restore" only the last htmx fragment loaded, not the entire html page with style tags. Fix is to use unique url on push that isn't in local cache which forces a server reload on tab wake from discard.

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wmanley 823 days ago

Try adding the response header: