Show HN: htmz – a low power tool for HTML

This is great. I had an idea to use named iframes and targeted forms for simple, server-rendered pages with built-in style-scoped widgets, without leaning into complex JS client-side. But, I never simplified it well nor expressed a polished and elegant realization of that idea, as this htmz looks to me to be.

A reminder to never give up good ideas, focus on excellence, and focus on refinement to a completion of an idea, and communicate well!

Also the comments here:

- This is a great hack and shows how close the browser is to offering SPA natively.

- This is a glorious demonstration of someone really understanding the platform.

- Simple and powerful, as the vanilla web should be. Thank you for this (small) gem :)

- This is a neat hack, I like it :). Thanks for sharing.

are exactly what I hoped to hear reflected about my creation, and are totally on point for what this type of thing should be. Close to the web-grain, using the given material of the web in the best way possible. Fuck yeah! :)

Thank you for being a genius! :)

And for inspiring about what's possible! :)

P.S - also your communication and marketing skills are top notch! I think the way you have communicated this elegant technical thing, from the choice of name, API, examples, copy -- is just awesome. I learn from it! :)

I happened to spend a little more time on htmx this weekend which htmz was inspired by.

htmx/htmz does do well for simple use cases, htmx does well for SSR heavy cases(e.g. django).

in the end I returned to vue.js, with a few lines code(put in a library) I can mimic htmx easily plus all the extra stuff vue.js brings, and no I do not need use a build tool for that, vuejs works fine via CDN inside a html for simple use cases the way htmx does, but vuejs can do more, e.g. draw live chart from data returned via ajax calls where vuejs is json by default, htmx is html by default instead.

Chances are I’m on your website for information, mostly text content. Which really doesn’t require JavaScript.

So then, most JavaScript on the web is enabling revenue generation rather than improving the user experience. So yeah, disabling JS is a proxy for, “don’t waste my time.”

But I agree that it’s not inherently bad, but just mostly bad (for the user.)

I think there's a pretty strong argument at this point for this kind of replacing DOM with a response behavior being part of the platform.

I think the first step would be an element that lets you load external content into the page declaratively. There's a spec issue open for this: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/2791

And my custom element implementation of the idea: https://www.npmjs.com/package/html-include-element

Then HTML could support these elements being targets of links.

Thanks for the clarification, so it would work the same as a static site where you just need a place to retrieve the files from