141–150 of 530 posts
Not HTMX but Alpine.js has been a complete revelation to me. What clicked for me was that you're enhancing server-rendered HTML, not replacing it. Need a dropdown menu? Add x-data="{ open: false }" and you're done. Want to show/hide elements? x-show does exactly what you expect etc. No bundler required, no compilation step.
> When you click it, HTMX POSTs to /clicked, and whatever HTML the server returns replaces the button. No fetch(). No setState(). No npm install. No fucking webpack config. Can someone explain something to me? To my view, the single best idea React has is that it forces you to encapsulate the full set of states in your component - not anywhere else. For instance, if you have a "Comment" button that becomes "Submitted…
I've only toyed around with htmx, but it really is refreshing. Of course you can't do everything that you can do with a fully-fledged client side framework. But once you try it out, you realize that more of the web is just markup + forms than you realized. I wouldn't build a live chat app with htmx, but I would totally build a reporting dashboard.
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What I don’t get is why I’d use it if I can’t write a reasonable complex SPA with it. React is easy for small websites so why would I use a separate framework when I can use one framework for everything?
I recently tried a hello-world in react. It made ten network requests on page load and probably had a sizable first download. That’s why web pages are so slow today.
You’re either doing something wrong or not actually doing a hello world.
You know, I see logic/"programming" inside of templates and I'm out, gave up that life many years ago and never have I been eager to go back to it. No, I'll keep using hiccup and similar things that are just data and nothing more, no syntax, just functions and built-in data structures, then give me HTML as a string which consumers can do whatever with, and we're golden.
click meNot HTMX but Alpine.js has been a complete revelation to me. What clicked for me was that you're enhancing server-rendered HTML, not replacing it. Need a dropdown menu? Add x-data="{ open: false }" and you're done. Want to show/hide elements? x-show does exactly what you expect etc. No bundler required, no compilation step.
I worked on a large commercial AlpineJS app and grew to really, really hate it. It's great for smallish projects where the limits of the tool are known, but it is in no way a drop-in replacement for something like React (and I am no fan of React). People like to throw around how easy it is to do basic things, but building a real app using Alpine is an absolute nightmare. Alpine data objects can grow to be quite large…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently tried a hello-world in react. It made ten network requests on page load and probably had a sizable first download. That’s why web pages are so slow today.
Hello world in react is just a few lines of code that mounts a react component to a dom element. There should be zero network requests beyond the initial download of html and js. You’re either doing something wrong or not actually doing a hello world.
If you never seen HTMX it is a small js library that lets you swap some part of your dom with the responses from your webserver. This means that in theory you (as a dev) don't need (to write any) js, nor do your users need to download a full page (for any interaction) like it's 1999. Your webserver replies with fully server-renderd HTML but just for the dom node (say a div) that you want to replace. It's fun for very…
> it is a small js library ... This means that in theory you don't need js I assume I'm not the only person left a little puzzled. Do you mean "don't need JS" as in like, a full-fledged JS framework?
The magic of this is that it's pretty easy to make SPA-like webapps with no javascript or complex client side framework. You can write your server in python, rust, clojure, whatever. If you don't need a lot of state management, it's really simple and awesome.
Well you didn’t write standard HTML attributes, you wrote custom attributes that are picked up by a JS framework, so potentially the worst of both worlds depending on your problem space.
Having tried HTMX a few times, the problem is firmly in creating a backend that feeds it properly. It’s a disjointed experience for anything more complicated than updating content.
To be honest this might be a skill issue or something I haven’t understood properly with these frameworks.