6 ms·

I Reviewed 1,000s of Opinions on HTMX

28 points by dphuang2 2y ago

talldayo 2y ago
> Current best practices often involve a more imperative style of programming, while HTMX, on the other hand, is more declarative. > This is a fundamentally new approach to interface design Which "best practices" are imperative, these days? I don't build many advanced web UIs but my impression is that most professional interfaces are handled with declarative XML-style schemas. It's hard to shake the feeling that this is a reinvented wheel...
- dphuang2 2y ago
  Actually, you are right. I must have had a freudian slip when I was thinking about React's conditional rendering pattern (https://react.dev/learn/conditional-rendering https://react.dev/learn/conditional-rendering). But I realize this is actually declarative. I think what I was trying to convey was that React involves more in-memory state management while HTMX embed that state in the HTML itself, which can be a jarring perspective shift in frontend programming. I'll fix this sentence so I don't confuse any future readers. Thanks for the catch!
- mejutoco 2y ago
  To be fair, while jsx (assuming you mean that one) indeed look like xml, the variables that get interpolated in it come from js code. Same with the events that are triggered and their callback functions. One could argue defining what gets updated on which event via attributes (htmx) is more declarative. On the other hand, it is not fully declarative because the server is rendering the html code with the attributes. But OP argued for more declarative, which I think it is fair.
digging 2y ago
So essentially, HTMX is not suitable for complex web apps with complex state, but it may be suitable for a simple web page that is only handling simple data. This is also, from what I know, what the creator of HTMX explicitly endorses. The main problem it's trying to solve is not that React is bad, but that people are using React to build simple pages which is unnecessary, like taking a private jet out to the suburbs.
- dphuang2 2y ago
  I like the private jet analogy. I think people are naturally comparing HTMX to React, which is the source of misunderstanding in this discussion. But its not entirely wrong to make this comparison because people are also slowly learning that HTMX may potentially be able to implement 90% of the use-cases. Now whether or not HTMX is "simpler" to implement in all of those use-cases is highly dependent on many factors like I called out in the article. Hopefully by understanding people's opinions, we can all make better engineering decisions though. I think
- recursivedoubts 2y ago
  i don't disagree that htmx can be a bad fit for applications with complex client-side state: https://htmx.org/essays/when-to-use-hypermedia/ https://htmx.org/essays/when-to-use-hypermedia/ But i also think you can push htmx a lot further than many people suspect with the judicious scripting: https://hypermedia.systems/client-side-scripting/ https://hypermedia.systems/client-side-scripting/ on the gripping hand, here's a guy building a crazy-ass clojure-based spreadsheet w/ htmx + scripting: https://fxtwitter.com/RustyVermeer/status/1726697531491623168 https://fxtwitter.com/RustyVermeer/status/172669753149162316... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- sremani 2y ago
  Fat Web Client are generally bad idea and most sites are better off being Thin Web Clients with Servers doing heavy lifting and lite frameworks like htmx fill in the gaps. The more appropriate analogy is, you do not need a sky-crane to build a single family home.
  - digging 2y ago
    I've personally worked on "simple" sites that actually had to do a ton of state management for user analytics and lead tracking purposes. (Whether or not all that tracking was necessary is out-of-scope for this comment...) It was pretty painful in a thin client; we were using PHP and jquery when I started. Even though the sites barely had any user-directed interactivity, I was really glad to migrate to React. Essentially I was able to shift my mental model of the site from content wrapper to software, and focus on how it could accomplish tasks, with content wrapping becoming fairly automated. In our case that was useful because it aligned with our business goals, although I didn't particularly care for it. I wonder how many bloated, React-cargo-culting sites are actually not using that bloat, vs using it for user-invisible and/or user-hostile purposes. Are devs out there building personal blogs as React SPAs still?
aiauthoritydev 2y ago
This is what I felt about htmx as well. cool for your own personal blog, but not really meant for that next big startup.
- bdcravens 2y ago
  Depends on the startup. I'd say it's probably better suited to a middle ground: the primarily server-rendered application that needs interactivity without committing to a huge build ecosystem. For most personal blogs, even HTMX is probably overkill.
- dphuang2 2y ago
  A personal blog probably only needs any library besides a markdown to HTML renderer (for the developer-focused) or framework that has a built-in WYSIWYG editor and CMS. From memory, i'm not to sure that a lot of problems that startups solve need a "thick-client" architecture. I think the canonical "thick-client" products are google sheets and google docs-esque products. I could be wrong about the actually distribution on this though. I think the author of HTMX phrased is correctly in that it really depends on where you are providing value—the backend or frontend. That would determine the viability of adopting HTMX.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ranger_danger 2y ago
I wished more people wrote articles like this. It makes me feel some kind of strange philosophical way however... like on one hand it makes me think "well yea, anyone who looks at different reviews would come to a similar conclusion", but the difference is that other people just aren't doing that, and for whatever reason let others shape their opinion on it instead of doing research. Similarly I've noticed other people will dismiss ideas for making money from something "because it has already been done to death." But yet someone else comes along and does just that, again, and turns a good profit, and now the critic is silent. The only difference is the critic simply didn't do the same thing themselves, but they could have. Am I just slowly arriving at a weird "this is how intelligence works" cross-roads? I might be losing it...
- mock-possum 2y ago
  Man I actually feel like there’s no meat to this article at all - no offense to the author - but no conclusion or recommendation or much of anything seems to be reached by the end. It’s kind of just summarizing some opinions without judging or critiquing or evaluating them - all of their paragraphs just seem to add up to “to be fair, both sides have an understandable point, and may be correct in certain contexts” - and then the article moves onto the next header, under which the process repeats. Honestly I didn’t get much at all out of this, other than a fairly transparent attempt to drive traffic to their site, so readers would see them plug their own product. Am I the only one? Is this unnecessarily harsh?
  - dphuang2 2y ago
    not harsh and not untrue :) But for context, the original intention of this article is to highlight opinions from the community. I feel that interleaving my own opinions would be untrue to the original intent.
    - ranger_danger 2y ago
      I very much appreciated your article and the unbiased comparison, please don't stop doing these :) I think my only comment on it at the moment might be to show more usage of common scenarios between e.g. htmx vs other paradigms or frameworks.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
evantbyrne 2y ago
The methodology is questionable. Experimentation would be a lot more informative. Build something with a couple different sets of technologies using the best practices for each stack (practices for a React SPA should be _very_ different from a server-rendered HTMX application). Then compare metrics like development time, code size, etc and discuss findings.
- dphuang2 2y ago
  Such an experiment has happened and well-documented here: https://htmx.org/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port/ https://htmx.org/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port/. But still, experiments only happen in one context so its hard to extrapolate how the results would predict your own situation. This is why I think parsing opinions is a great through-provoking exercise.
  - evantbyrne 2y ago
    It depends on the purpose of the analysis. To have any place in serious decision making, the methodology itself needs to be justified. One cannot simply assume that filtering social media posts by upvotes translates to real differences in the software development lifecycle. To give an anecdotal example of challenges with the given approach, most professional developers I've met do not meaningfully track time spent on tasks. So one of the questions that could be raised is: do developers on social media even have the data or experience to make these evaluations?
    - dphuang2 2y ago
      The original purpose of the article is to highlight opinions from the community—not to be a scientific conclusion on what approach is better. If somebody is seeking an answer for their own engineering problems, then the necessary due diligence is always required on their part.
      - evantbyrne 2y ago
        Please do not take this criticism personally, but it also fails as a survey. Two issues that immediately stand out are that responses were filtered out entirely for not being the most popular and then the remainder were cherry picked based on unclear criteria. You seem to have an interest in surveys and many of the skills needed to conduct them, so it would benefit you to study the topic more scientifically. Wish you the best.
_heimdall 2y ago
> HTMX is a step back, not forward Funny enough, that's always been in the pro column for me. We need a step back from the path we've gone down since react was introduced. React and similar tools absolutely solve specific problems, but we shouldn't be building nearly as many sites with those tools as we do - not everyone is building Facebook.
rokkitmensch 2y ago
This piece may not be AI-generated, but it sure fails to rise above the quality of AI writing.
niutech 2y ago
HTMX is not lightweight, its size is 44KB minified, whereas you can get similar behavior using 166-byte (sic!) HTMZ: https://leanrada.com/htmz/ https://leanrada.com/htmz/

28 points by dphuang2 2y ago

> Current best practices often involve a more imperative style of programming, while HTMX, on the other hand, is more declarative. > This is a fundamentally new approach to interface design Which "best practices" are imperative, these days? I don't build many advanced web UIs but my impression is that most professional interfaces are handled with declarative XML-style schemas. It's hard to shake the feeling that this is a reinvented wheel...

dphuang2 2y ago
Actually, you are right. I must have had a freudian slip when I was thinking about React's conditional rendering pattern (https://react.dev/learn/conditional-rendering https://react.dev/learn/conditional-rendering). But I realize this is actually declarative. I think what I was trying to convey was that React involves more in-memory state management while HTMX embed that state in the HTML itself, which can be a jarring perspective shift in frontend programming. I'll fix this sentence so I don't confuse any future readers. Thanks for the catch!
mejutoco 2y ago
To be fair, while jsx (assuming you mean that one) indeed look like xml, the variables that get interpolated in it come from js code. Same with the events that are triggered and their callback functions. One could argue defining what gets updated on which event via attributes (htmx) is more declarative. On the other hand, it is not fully declarative because the server is rendering the html code with the attributes. But OP argued for more declarative, which I think it is fair.

digging 2y ago

So essentially, HTMX is not suitable for complex web apps with complex state, but it may be suitable for a simple web page that is only handling simple data. This is also, from what I know, what the creator of HTMX explicitly endorses. The main problem it's trying to solve is not that React is bad, but that people are using React to build simple pages which is unnecessary, like taking a private jet out to the suburbs.

dphuang2 2y ago
I like the private jet analogy. I think people are naturally comparing HTMX to React, which is the source of misunderstanding in this discussion. But its not entirely wrong to make this comparison because people are also slowly learning that HTMX may potentially be able to implement 90% of the use-cases. Now whether or not HTMX is "simpler" to implement in all of those use-cases is highly dependent on many factors like I called out in the article. Hopefully by understanding people's opinions, we can all make better engineering decisions though. I think
recursivedoubts 2y ago
i don't disagree that htmx can be a bad fit for applications with complex client-side state: https://htmx.org/essays/when-to-use-hypermedia/ https://htmx.org/essays/when-to-use-hypermedia/ But i also think you can push htmx a lot further than many people suspect with the judicious scripting: https://hypermedia.systems/client-side-scripting/ https://hypermedia.systems/client-side-scripting/ on the gripping hand, here's a guy building a crazy-ass clojure-based spreadsheet w/ htmx + scripting: https://fxtwitter.com/RustyVermeer/status/1726697531491623168 https://fxtwitter.com/RustyVermeer/status/172669753149162316... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
sremani 2y ago
Fat Web Client are generally bad idea and most sites are better off being Thin Web Clients with Servers doing heavy lifting and lite frameworks like htmx fill in the gaps. The more appropriate analogy is, you do not need a sky-crane to build a single family home.
- digging 2y ago
  I've personally worked on "simple" sites that actually had to do a ton of state management for user analytics and lead tracking purposes. (Whether or not all that tracking was necessary is out-of-scope for this comment...) It was pretty painful in a thin client; we were using PHP and jquery when I started. Even though the sites barely had any user-directed interactivity, I was really glad to migrate to React. Essentially I was able to shift my mental model of the site from content wrapper to software, and focus on how it could accomplish tasks, with content wrapping becoming fairly automated. In our case that was useful because it aligned with our business goals, although I didn't particularly care for it. I wonder how many bloated, React-cargo-culting sites are actually not using that bloat, vs using it for user-invisible and/or user-hostile purposes. Are devs out there building personal blogs as React SPAs still?

aiauthoritydev 2y ago

This is what I felt about htmx as well. cool for your own personal blog, but not really meant for that next big startup.

bdcravens 2y ago
Depends on the startup. I'd say it's probably better suited to a middle ground: the primarily server-rendered application that needs interactivity without committing to a huge build ecosystem. For most personal blogs, even HTMX is probably overkill.
dphuang2 2y ago
A personal blog probably only needs any library besides a markdown to HTML renderer (for the developer-focused) or framework that has a built-in WYSIWYG editor and CMS. From memory, i'm not to sure that a lot of problems that startups solve need a "thick-client" architecture. I think the canonical "thick-client" products are google sheets and google docs-esque products. I could be wrong about the actually distribution on this though. I think the author of HTMX phrased is correctly in that it really depends on where you are providing value—the backend or frontend. That would determine the viability of adopting HTMX.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ranger_danger 2y ago

I wished more people wrote articles like this. It makes me feel some kind of strange philosophical way however... like on one hand it makes me think "well yea, anyone who looks at different reviews would come to a similar conclusion", but the difference is that other people just aren't doing that, and for whatever reason let others shape their opinion on it instead of doing research. Similarly I've noticed other people will dismiss ideas for making money from something "because it has already been done to death." But yet someone else comes along and does just that, again, and turns a good profit, and now the critic is silent. The only difference is the critic simply didn't do the same thing themselves, but they could have. Am I just slowly arriving at a weird "this is how intelligence works" cross-roads? I might be losing it...

mock-possum 2y ago
Man I actually feel like there’s no meat to this article at all - no offense to the author - but no conclusion or recommendation or much of anything seems to be reached by the end. It’s kind of just summarizing some opinions without judging or critiquing or evaluating them - all of their paragraphs just seem to add up to “to be fair, both sides have an understandable point, and may be correct in certain contexts” - and then the article moves onto the next header, under which the process repeats. Honestly I didn’t get much at all out of this, other than a fairly transparent attempt to drive traffic to their site, so readers would see them plug their own product. Am I the only one? Is this unnecessarily harsh?
- dphuang2 2y ago
  not harsh and not untrue :) But for context, the original intention of this article is to highlight opinions from the community. I feel that interleaving my own opinions would be untrue to the original intent.
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    I very much appreciated your article and the unbiased comparison, please don't stop doing these :) I think my only comment on it at the moment might be to show more usage of common scenarios between e.g. htmx vs other paradigms or frameworks.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

evantbyrne 2y ago

The methodology is questionable. Experimentation would be a lot more informative. Build something with a couple different sets of technologies using the best practices for each stack (practices for a React SPA should be _very_ different from a server-rendered HTMX application). Then compare metrics like development time, code size, etc and discuss findings.

dphuang2 2y ago
Such an experiment has happened and well-documented here: https://htmx.org/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port/ https://htmx.org/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port/. But still, experiments only happen in one context so its hard to extrapolate how the results would predict your own situation. This is why I think parsing opinions is a great through-provoking exercise.
- evantbyrne 2y ago
  It depends on the purpose of the analysis. To have any place in serious decision making, the methodology itself needs to be justified. One cannot simply assume that filtering social media posts by upvotes translates to real differences in the software development lifecycle. To give an anecdotal example of challenges with the given approach, most professional developers I've met do not meaningfully track time spent on tasks. So one of the questions that could be raised is: do developers on social media even have the data or experience to make these evaluations?
  - dphuang2 2y ago
    The original purpose of the article is to highlight opinions from the community—not to be a scientific conclusion on what approach is better. If somebody is seeking an answer for their own engineering problems, then the necessary due diligence is always required on their part.
    - evantbyrne 2y ago
      Please do not take this criticism personally, but it also fails as a survey. Two issues that immediately stand out are that responses were filtered out entirely for not being the most popular and then the remainder were cherry picked based on unclear criteria. You seem to have an interest in surveys and many of the skills needed to conduct them, so it would benefit you to study the topic more scientifically. Wish you the best.

_heimdall 2y ago

> HTMX is a step back, not forward Funny enough, that's always been in the pro column for me. We need a step back from the path we've gone down since react was introduced. React and similar tools absolutely solve specific problems, but we shouldn't be building nearly as many sites with those tools as we do - not everyone is building Facebook.

rokkitmensch 2y ago

This piece may not be AI-generated, but it sure fails to rise above the quality of AI writing.

niutech 2y ago

HTMX is not lightweight, its size is 44KB minified, whereas you can get similar behavior using 166-byte (sic!) HTMZ: https://leanrada.com/htmz/ https://leanrada.com/htmz/