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Please just try HTMX

pleasejusttryhtmx.com

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Re: Please just try HTMX

#451

Post by calhotel »

g947o wrote: 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…

No one is forcing you to use it. I haven't used it myself, but htmx looks to be a good solution for many web applications.

Re: Please just try HTMX

#452

Post by testermelon »

g947o wrote: post #152
foldr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, the article has a section titled “The Numbers” which links to this: https://htmx.org/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port/

Different teams/projects have different needs and require different solutions. While it's good it worked in their favor, I am quite confident that someone else can tell a completely different story. In fact, there are some comments in this very HN discussion that detail their negative experience with htmx. I would not use one or the other to "convince" anybody to go with either solution like what this article attempt…

Disliking evangelism is something most of us can relate. I give you that. And everything you said is very reasonable.

But have you tried it though? Don’t you think it’s time to give your story? Slam your needs to htmx and see what comes out of it’s ruins?

Re: Please just try HTMX

#453

Post by cassiogo »

viiralvx wrote: post #157
recursivedoubts wrote: post #29

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…

Damn, Unpoly looks great! Never tried HTMX but have been a fan of it, it solves a UX problem that frameworks like Django and Rails suffer from, without needing to bring in something heavy like React. I'm currently working on a side project in Rails using Stimulus but sometimes I wonder if Stimulus is overkill with all of the controllers and stuff as well. Do you have an opinion on when you should reach for something…

I think the htmx counterpart from Rails folks would be Turbo not Stimulus

Re: Please just try HTMX

#454

Post by Hammershaft »

slekker wrote: post #279
perardi wrote: post #60

I did. My startup did. And now we’re going to rip it all out and move to a React front-end. HTMX makes response handling much more complex. Every endpoint returns 3–5 different HTML fragments. Frontend and backend must agree on every scenario — success, validation errors, system errors, partial updates, full reloads. And HTMX is still a fairly obscure library. The documentation and examples are lacking, there isn’t a…

> and is great for agentic AI coding. Definitely sad to see this everywhere nowadays, tech choices made because of AI

We are locking in path dependence on flawed technologies because by nature newer technologies lack the training distribution needed for good LLM output. Our industry is in a pretty dismal state.

Re: Please just try HTMX

#455

Post by 63stack »

moregrist wrote: post #330
azangru wrote: post #162

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…

I think the number of job postings is pretty related to factors that I do consider valid when selecting a piece of technology (eg: language, framework, etc): - How easy is it to hire people with experience in this? - Relatedly, how easy will it be for the org to maintain this software after I (or the original team) leaves?

You can be productive in htmx after spending less than an hour reading the docs, even though there are (I assume) zero jobs asking for it

Re: Please just try HTMX

#456

Post by IgorPartola »

arethuza wrote: post #436
IgorPartola wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never loved the idea of the server rendering HTML which is probably why I have such a hard time with HTMX. In every other paradigm you clearly separate your server API and UI rendering/logic. Web apps are the only place where it seems common to have the server render UI components. Imagine if you had a Java or Swift application and had the server sending your phone UI screens. I don’t even know how you would p…

X (the Window System not the thing that was Twitter) explicitly allowed a remote machine to send rendering commands over a network to the local machine? (I'm avoiding using the term "server" as X has this round the other way - from the users perspective the server is local and the client can be remote). Sun's NeWS also allowed something similar - but with a large amount of programmability using PostScript.

Sure but that was with the idea that everything happens synchronously. TeamViewer also renders the UI remotely. Any system where the client actually does any state management and not just pixel/character rendering does not use this. While the X system did allow this, real world systems did not use any of these remote rendering commands besides “render pixels”.

Re: Please just try HTMX

#457

Post by yawaramin »

yellow_lead wrote: post #264
adamzwasserman wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly? I never think about it. I've never had to. What did you run into? Curious what the pain point was.

I had a site where the user can upload a file If it exceeds it, I returned 400. I had to add an event listener to check for the code (htmx:afterRequest) and show an alert(), but this gets difficult to manage if there's multiple requests to different endpoints on the page. Looking at it now, maybe I should have configured HTMX to swap for 4xx.

See https://dev.to/yawaramin/handling-form-errors-in-htmx-3ncg

Re: Please just try HTMX

#458

Post by forzerpendulum »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #29

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…

Htmx is pleasant to use, but I lost a little respect for you after this prudish comment.

Re: Please just try HTMX

#459

Post by ceuk »

weiliddat wrote: post #305
g947o wrote: 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…

Here's a real-time-ish planning poker written in Go + Htmx in ~500 LoC App (can take a few seconds to spin up if dormant): https://estimate.work/ Source: https://github.com/weiliddat/estimate-work

I mean I built a pretty featureful P2P planning poker app using React and it's around 1300 lines of typescript.

More, but I don't think it's a mind-blowing difference and I wasn't playing code golf when I wrote it. I wouldn't have used redux if I was!

https://github.com/ceuk/planning-poker

Re: Please just try HTMX

#460

Post by intrasight »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #449
intrasight wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One language - JSX - has 10 jobs. The other language - HTML - has over 30,000 jobs

lol JSX isn't a language. There aren't "JSX" jobs. I feel like only a backend developer trying to score "gotcha" points could make this argument and be confident about it.

There are emacs modes for it, so I claim it's a language.
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