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Please just try HTMX

pleasejusttryhtmx.com

201–210 of 530 posts

Re: Please just try HTMX

#201

> "I'm not a fucking saint" You're not a fucking person, this is LLM output. It starts with the overdone sweary thing then mentions it's overdone and says it's not gonna do it, and it's almost enough to make me think the article is going to offer someone's point of view. But once again the LLM has erased any point of view the author may have had going in (or prevented them from developing it) and replaced it with a m…

Do you have evidence, or is it mostly vibes?

EDIT: Decided to dig up the source: https://github.com/algal/pleasejusttryhtmx/commits?author=al...

Looks like the initial commit might well have been generated, and then the document touched up in several following commits.

But there's clearly a person behind it: algal.

Re: Please just try HTMX

#202
This is a retarded advice. Author clearly never tried to develop any serious web development.

> the build time is over 30 seconds!

that's silly. 30 seconds building time is nothing compare to the accumulated time you wait for micro changes to your frontend.

for typical web development using react/vue/svelte you have hot code reloading, which can reload the current website for htmx to update, you have to wait for your whole server to reload (which can be way slower even you use interpreted languages like ruby or python, due to complexity of the framework you use).

not to mention it does not keep any state of the current website, make debugging way more troublesome compare to a js mature framework.

only people who never have to improve their website incrementally think htmx is a viable option. or insane people.

obviously, for some small websites with minimal interactions or no need to change the content very often, then htmx can be good, but for that case, vanilla js also works, and they do not need 14kb of excess baggage.

Re: Please just try HTMX

#204

HTMX is a great choice for an app that only needs forms, validation and partial template rendering, though CSS view transitions are making partials less relevant for server side web applications. For things with heavy interaction (drag and drop, chat etc.), I find the code to make it work with HTMX is just too clumsy to work with as a mental model.

That's exactly what the article is saying.

Re: Please just try HTMX

#206
post #37
post #6

Man I did try htmx, and I was hopeful, right until I saw how it polluted my codebase. I can't say I have the answers, but writing a pure Go app, I'm currently using one giant css file, custom styling and inline html. And now I'm at the breaking point. So I'm planning to move to tailwind and Go templates, but honestly, i was hopeful for htmx, so I need to properly see the usecase. Which i don't know is this. It remind…

This is the thing. Htmx is great if you only consider the frontend. But it does require fixing up the backed to match. A framework like that needs to integrate the front & back ends fairly tightly to have good UX. You may be interested in Datastar which does this better IMHO https://data-star.dev/

My current plan is to switch to Datastar too, although the devs seem a little odd. The guys writing HTMX seem like a more professional bunch.

Re: Please just try HTMX

#207
post #15

I am tired of people using the smallest "Hello World" example to demonstrate how something is better than React -- "See, you don't need all these things to get a website up and running!" Of course it will work. I can vibe code the most terrible web framework you have seen within 20 minutes and claim it is better than React, but what does it prove? > You write zero JavaScript > The whole library is ~14kb gzipped Oh su…

To put a bit more colour on this, I think the fear of most devs with an ultra-simple framework like this is that eventually you hit a wall where you need it to do something it doesn't natively do, and because the only thing you know is these magical declarative hx-whatever attributes, there's no way forward. I appreciate the basic demos, but I think what would really sell me is showing the extensibility story. Show m…

> To put a bit more colour on this, I think the fear of most devs with an ultra-simple framework like this is that eventually you hit a wall where you need it to do something it doesn't natively do, and because the only thing you know is these magical declarative hx-whatever attributes, there's no way forward.

I'm not sure "fear" is exactly the right word here, but it's something I consciously evaluate for when looking at any new framework or library. Anything that has a lot of "magic" or "by-convention" type config is subject to this.

You start with the "hello world" example, and then you hit that wall. The test of an awesome framework vs a fundamentally limited (or even broken) one is: can you build on what you have with extensions, or do you have to rewrite everything you did? There's a lot of these where as soon as you want to do something slightly custom, you can't use _any_ of the magic and have to redo everything in a different way.

This isn't just libraries either. Another almost worse example is AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Simple way to get an app up and going, and it handles a lot of the boilerplate stuff for you. The problem is as soon as you want to extend it slightly, like have another custom load balancer route, you actually have to completely abandon the entire thing and do _everything_ yourself.

This is a really hard thing to get right, but in my view is one of the things that contributes to a framework's longevity. If you hit that wall and can't get past it, the next project you do will be in something else. Once enough people start posting about their experiences hitting the wall, other people won't even pick it up and the framework dwindles to a niche audience or dies completely.

Re: Please just try HTMX

#209

Hey, I created htmx and while I appreciate the publicity, I’m not a huge fan of these types of hyperbolic articles. There are lots of different ways to build web apps with their own strengths and weaknesses. I try to assess htmx’s strengths and weaknesses here: https://htmx.org/essays/when-to-use-hypermedia/ Also, please try unpoly: https://unpoly.com/ It’s another excellent hypermedia oriented library Edit: the arti…

I'm curious if the author of the article is an HN reader, and if yes, how this comment is received.

I will never ever ever ever touch htmx after this interaction I just witnessed.

Re: Please just try HTMX

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No Jobs > Another practical reason not to use htmx is that there are, rounding off, zero htmx jobs. > I just did a search for htmx jobs on indeed and found a grand total of two: one at Microsoft and one at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. > A search for “react”, on the other hand, gives 13,758 jobs. > Seriously, developer, which of these two technologies do you want to hitch your career to? I do not advocated for htm…

The author of the article is the creator of htmx. There is some tongue in cheek here.

As I read, I thought, "I'm pretty sure I disagree with this guy" about once per paragraph. I didn't know. Thank you.
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