While HTMLX makes some interactions easier for developers without JS experience, the primary issue in web development is that the browser was not designed for

While HTMLX makes some interactions easier for developers without JS experience, the primary issue in web development is that the browser was not designed for apps. It evolved unevenly from a document navigation platform, and many things we do in web development today are hacks due to the lack of a better solution. In my opinion, the future of the web as a platform is about viewing the web browser as an operating system with basic composable primitives. HTMLX adds attributes to HTML using JS, and the argument about "no-JavaScript" is misleading: with HTMLX you can write interactions without JS, but HTMX uses JS. But, as it forces you to use HTML constructs that will work without scripts (such as forms), the page will fall back. It doesn't means that the fallback is usable. The custom HTMLX attributes work because the browser supports extensions of its behavior using JS. If we add those attributes to the standard HTML, the result is more fragmentation and an endless race. The best standard is one that eliminates the need for creating more high-level standards. In my view, a possible evolution of WASM could achieve that goal. It means going in the opposite direction of the article, as clients will do more computing work. In a future like that, you can use HTMLX, SwiftUI, Flutter, or React to develop web apps. The biggest challenge is to balance a powerful OS-like browser like that with attributes like searchability, accessibility, and learnability (the devtools inspect and console is the closest thing to Smalltalk we have today)...even desktop OSs struggle today to provide that.