[Grimblewald]

It's been massive for me as well. I would say my web developmemt is best described as dabbling in web development, and I mostly do so for websites that cater to academic interests and conference / society managment and organising. So, relativly niche.

However, I think HTMX is a beauty. Fast, simple, and doesnt come with all the bloat and BS a JS heavy / JS first deployment comes with. I can quikckly build fast and responsive sites that cost visitors very little to use/interact with.

websites have less compatability issues now, load extremely fast (google web speed score from 60-80 to flat 100), and have fewer points of failure. Debugging is a breeze. Websites are no less pretty or useful for it. In fact, they look better now because time otherwise wasted on Js BS is now free to use to tinker with / improve aesthetic, or add new features.

I'm in love with HTMX. It feels like what the web should have always been. There's absolutly zero reason a random website, without my knowledge or consent, should be running extremely heavy compute and analytics on my own device. That should never have been possible/permissible in the first place.

[robertoandred]

HTMX is just as JS compute heavy. It's not magic.

[yawaramin]

How is htmx ‘just as JS compute heavy’? It’s doing way less than your average SPA. Have you seen the sizes of the JS bundles of popular SPAs? They make htmx look microscopic in comparison.

[troupo]

It's a 14kb library that invents its own templating syntax and DSL and also requires the backend to conform to its DSL.

Yes, it's smaller than some other frameworks, but let's stop with "doesn't require JS" nd other bullshit

[yawaramin]

It doesn’t have its own templating syntax, it just uses server side HTML generation. It doesn’t require the backend to ‘conform’ to anything, it works with very standard HTTP forms and HTML responses. I’m afraid you’re very confused!

[troupo]

> It doesn’t have its own templating syntax

What do you think hx-get and hx-trigger="input changed delay:1s" are? Standard browser attributes? Standard browser functionality and behaviour? Standard events syntax?

> It doesn’t require the backend to ‘conform’ to anything,

Just one of the quotes from the docs: "You would need to check on the server side for the HX-Request header to differentiate between an htmx-driven and a regular request, to determine exactly what to render to the client."

> I’m afraid you’re very confused!

I'm afraid I'm not

[yawaramin]

> What do you think hx-get and hx-trigger

Hx-attributes are not a new ‘templating syntax’, they’re custom attributes with a simple DSL for describing triggers and swaps. You can prefix them with ‘data-‘ if you want and they will be 100% standards-conformant. HTML itself is full of these little in-attribute DSLs–look up the standard ‘autocomplete’ attribute:

    <textarea autocomplete="shipping street-address"></textarea>

When people complain about this stuff, they just reveal they don’t know HTML.

> …from the docs: "You would need to check on the server side for the HX-Request header…

Yes, this is how HTTP content negotiation works. The client sends headers to the server describing what it wants and the server sends headers describing what it gives. I hope you’re not suggesting that htmx invented this technique. It’s kinda funny to suggest that htmx forces servers to ‘conform’ to something when most of today’s JS frameworks do server-side rendering only on JavaScript server runtimes.

[tailscaler2026]

That's how progressive enhancement works. The website should work fine if JS is disabled. Then it's faster via htmx if JS is enabled, and more so if the backend is tuned as well.

[jdiaz97]

yeah if that's a problem you can always use fixi https://github.com/bigskysoftware/fixi

[troupo]

What does that have to do with anything? Literally the same thing (only difference is size)

[rolymath]

You're saying we need magic for different js frameworks to have different performance profiles?