4 ms·

Some critiques focus on the developer insecurities that make them vulnerable to HTMX's charms: - Writing Vanilla JS ES6+ is not that hard, actually it is prett

Some critiques focus on the developer insecurities that make them vulnerable to HTMX's charms: - Writing Vanilla JS ES6+ is not that hard, actually it is pretty fun. - Toolchain for JS/TS/CSS was bad but is pretty good now. esbuild is simple and great. - Dodging learning the above two things does not serve the dev. Others have to do with foundational aspects of the project: - HTMX is in denial of need to support native clients. IIRC, the official recommendation is that native clients should parse HTML for values. - HTMX is still just a javascript library dependency with syntax that must be learned by whoever picks up the project. IMO HTMX's buzz can largely be attributed to anti-frontend or anti modern frontend. This thread describes this idea: https://twitter.com/DanaWoodman/status/1682075711266496512 https://twitter.com/DanaWoodman/status/1682075711266496512

ColonelPhantom 3y ago
Why would I write my own JS when "hx-get" does the job? Writing your own JS makes sense in some cases, but using HTML partials is also useful in many cases where you need to talk to the server anyways (since they e.g. prevent logic duplication). HTMX just makes it easy to work with them, as they're a single attribute away, rather than doing the request and insertion by hand. Native clients are deliberately out of scope, but scraping HTML isn't the suggested solution. Rather, it is having a JSON API next to the hypermedia API: https://htmx.org/essays/splitting-your-apis/ https://htmx.org/essays/splitting-your-apis/. This does have the downside of duplicate work, but does bring stability to the API without introducing something like GraphQL. And yes, you will need to learn HTMX to use HTMX. But the surface of HTMX is generally quite small, and composes well with knowledge about HTML/CSS.
greenie_beans 3y ago
> Writing Vanilla JS ES6+ is not that hard, actually it is pretty fun. i like vanilla es6 too. i've enjoyed using it with htmx, rather than using intercooler or alpine.

ColonelPhantom 3y ago

Why would I write my own JS when "hx-get" does the job? Writing your own JS makes sense in some cases, but using HTML partials is also useful in many cases where you need to talk to the server anyways (since they e.g. prevent logic duplication). HTMX just makes it easy to work with them, as they're a single attribute away, rather than doing the request and insertion by hand. Native clients are deliberately out of scope, but scraping HTML isn't the suggested solution. Rather, it is having a JSON API next to the hypermedia API: https://htmx.org/essays/splitting-your-apis/ https://htmx.org/essays/splitting-your-apis/. This does have the downside of duplicate work, but does bring stability to the API without introducing something like GraphQL. And yes, you will need to learn HTMX to use HTMX. But the surface of HTMX is generally quite small, and composes well with knowledge about HTML/CSS.

greenie_beans 3y ago

> Writing Vanilla JS ES6+ is not that hard, actually it is pretty fun. i like vanilla es6 too. i've enjoyed using it with htmx, rather than using intercooler or alpine.