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The discussion about Library vs. Framework misses the core objective of the HTMX project.
It is not the same at all. Of course it needs javascript on the back to work. But the concept is totally different. It uses a hypermedia declarative model, an extended POST/GET etc. model. It keeps things very simple compared to a framework like React where you need a package manager, a transpiler and a json backend for data (not returning hypermedia). So I would not consider it another Javascript frontend framework…
Obviously like any lib it has an API but HTMX doesn't force a project structure to you.
Say you use python and Django. Why use htmx instead of Django templates? Same with ruby and rails, elixir and phoenix, etc. the trend is clearly towards live view/hotwire OR things like server side react. Htmx is in a weird position that makes no sense unless you want to use it for the sake of using it.
So what's the problem with a bundler/transpiler etc? You set it up once. It takes a few hours, maybe a day. Then your platform _is_ TypeScript + React. This abstraction basically never leaks. I never need to look at the transpiled files to find an error. Nobody argues that a C compiler is worse than assembly or that drivers or an operating system are bad.
I've had a codebase that sat for as little as 6 months without me touching it. When I tried to run it again, I ran into so many compatibility issues that I had to tediously copy out all of my code into a new project and then fix the remaining issues with my code itself.
Web dev build systems are dependencies on top of dependencies on top of dependencies, and they're all introducing breaking changes every other week it seems.
So what's the problem with a bundler/transpiler etc? You set it up once. It takes a few hours, maybe a day. Then your platform _is_ TypeScript + React. This abstraction basically never leaks. I never need to look at the transpiled files to find an error. Nobody argues that a C compiler is worse than assembly or that drivers or an operating system are bad.
Until you need to update a dependency on a large codebase, which takes weeks because dependency A doesn't work with dependency B version X, and updating dependency B means that it no longer works with dependency C version Y, and so on. And nobody uses dependency C anymore -- it's unmaintained, so you need to rewrite everything to use dependency D.
Then you need to repeat this every few months because there's nonstop vulnerabilities flagged and APIs broken.
Nah, I'm good.
Haven't heard of htmx before, but I might use it on a future project if I remember. As somebody who is not a frontend engineer, but still likes to make a website every now and then. I haven't found a full framework (vue, react, etc.) that I've been able to go full into and still use jquery and writing plain css/html. Htmx looks like a slight feature upgrade to jquery that I enjoy.
HTMX aims to render itself obsolete by serving as a proof of concept to advance the HTML specification. In various interviews and blog posts, Carson has mentioned that jQuery was essential only until browsers implemented features like `querySelectorAll`. The discussion about Library vs. Framework misses the core objective of the HTMX project.
"always has been" ᕦ(̿ ̿ -̿ ̿ )つ/̵͇̿̿/’̿’̿ ̿ ̿̿ ̿̿ ̿̿