3 ms·

The beauty of htmx is that it doesn't matter what you use on the backend. Literally anything that'll render HTML will suffice. Even static HTML files on a web

The beauty of htmx is that it doesn't matter what you use on the backend. Literally anything that'll render HTML will suffice. Even static HTML files on a web server will do. No need for an application server at all if you're clever and your needs are simple.

sureglymop 3y ago
What if I want the website to work even when JavaScript is not turned on? I'd need a backend server and some frontend logic handling that case.
- iudqnolq 3y ago
  Not necessarily. It depends on what you need. For example suppose you were implementing an news reader with two panes. Left pane is a list of titles and previews, right pane is a full article for the selected item in the left pane. You can make the left pane a list of links to dedicated pages, and then add an htmx attribute to indicate that when the user has JavaScript to instead fetch a html snippet with just full article and swap it into the right pane. If you had a reasonably bounded set of articles you could statically generate all the /article/id.html and the /article/id/snippet.html files, though a backend probably makes sense.
  - sureglymop 3y ago
    At that point, how big is the difference really between sending the right pane only as opposed to the whole page performance wise? I'm just not sure if this approach is worth it for me.
- wishinghand 3y ago
  In that case you need to have everything rendered server side and perhaps get creative with the usage of forms firing off events that can be intercepted by the server and then return a new page. Certain things like Nav menu drop downs and folding text can’t be done with native CSS and HTML.
  - srgpqt 3y ago
    Hold my beer: that’s something you can do with the input checkbox trick. Here’s an example: https://codepen.io/daviddarnes/pen/abVaGG https://codepen.io/daviddarnes/pen/abVaGG
    - memco 3y ago
      You might also be able to use a <details> element for the drop-down state.

sureglymop 3y ago

What if I want the website to work even when JavaScript is not turned on? I'd need a backend server and some frontend logic handling that case.

iudqnolq 3y ago
Not necessarily. It depends on what you need. For example suppose you were implementing an news reader with two panes. Left pane is a list of titles and previews, right pane is a full article for the selected item in the left pane. You can make the left pane a list of links to dedicated pages, and then add an htmx attribute to indicate that when the user has JavaScript to instead fetch a html snippet with just full article and swap it into the right pane. If you had a reasonably bounded set of articles you could statically generate all the /article/id.html and the /article/id/snippet.html files, though a backend probably makes sense.
- sureglymop 3y ago
  At that point, how big is the difference really between sending the right pane only as opposed to the whole page performance wise? I'm just not sure if this approach is worth it for me.
wishinghand 3y ago
In that case you need to have everything rendered server side and perhaps get creative with the usage of forms firing off events that can be intercepted by the server and then return a new page. Certain things like Nav menu drop downs and folding text can’t be done with native CSS and HTML.
- srgpqt 3y ago
  Hold my beer: that’s something you can do with the input checkbox trick. Here’s an example: https://codepen.io/daviddarnes/pen/abVaGG https://codepen.io/daviddarnes/pen/abVaGG
  - memco 3y ago
    You might also be able to use a <details> element for the drop-down state.