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- Hacker News
- I really enjoyed reading this - very clear technical writing and I learned quite a bit about htmx and their approach to API design generally from it.by simonw
- Great to see this evolution! Realtime ssr hypermedia is definitely the future.
But, my thoughts immediately go to Datastar, which has Fetch, SSE, declarative signals and js expressions, dom morphing, and much more - in a tiny package. I find it to have a more flexible, expressive and standards-compliant API as well. And it'll soon have a simple reactive web components and css framework as well.
At this point, why use HTMX when it really seems like (a heavier) Datastar-lite?
by nchmy - I feel like people who crave stability pull all the wrong lessons from how to get to stability when doing this sort of "ok we'll make _one_ major version with all the breaking changes we've built up over time".
This feels like a repeat of the Python 3.0 strategy, though obviously at a much smaller scale. Some stuff is of course hard to roll out but to me it feels "obvious" that having a 4.0 with the inheritence change (or even better, a 2.1 with a toggle on that change!), then a 5.0 with some other changes, then a 6.0 with other changes... all feels way easier to manage than a 4.0 with all the changes at once.
We have version pinning! People who want 2.0 can have 2.0 "forever", so version numbers that go up very high are not actually a problem. Many releases can of course be a bit of a frustration from a release maker's perspective, but given that htmx is the way it is (ain't even getting type checking helping you out on any of this like you would with React!), having the gradual path seems way better.
"I think I've handled the 10 changes in between 2.0 and 4.0... but forgot the 11th change" is a constant annoyance with these huge major version bumps.
I will once again point to the Django strategy of having breaking changes be rolled out over several releases, including in between releases where "both" models exist. It is a very nice way to do release management when rolling things out, gives good checkpoints for pushing things out, and overall means users are seeing less bugs. Going from `XMLHttpRequest` to `fetch` really might not be a feasable thing to toggle, but a lot of the other stuff in that list feels like it.
by rtpg - > By switching to fetch(), we can take advantage of its support for readable streams, which allow for a stream of content to be swapped into the DOM, rather than a single response.
Based on this section, it will be interesting to see how this evolves. I've used HTMX a bunch but after stumbling on Datastar I've come to prefer it. Partially because I don't need something like alpine.js to get some frontend goodies but also because I've come to appreciate the power of SSE streaming morphable targets to the browser
by lazypenguin - > hx-target attribute is explicitly declared as inherited on the enclosing div and, if it wasn’t, the button elements would not inherit the target from it.
So confusing. I'm pretty sure it should be "inheritable", because "inherited" on an attribute means the attribute is inherited, not the element's children will inherit the attribute.
UPDATE: or "inherit", sounds like a command, little less confusing.
by deepsun - I think the ideas behind HTMX are cool, and Carson’s advocacy around Hypermedia is great.
I came from SPA-land and was tired of the fundamental architectural issue of having to keep the front-end and back-end state in sync.
I’ve compared Datastar and HTMX and decided on Datastar. There’s overlap between the two libraries in that they both support the request/response model, but with Datastar my learning investment takes me further and opens up new possibilities.
In one project I was able to remove a bunch of polling code and simply push a signal from the server to the browser when an external event occurred. The reduction in complexity was crazy.
On an internal tool I noticed I didn’t need Alpine.js anymore, and while anytime I can remove a dependency is a good time, the conceptual simplicity is what really makes me happy.
Now I’m doing a small app where I decided to make a streaming connection between browser and server and simply regenerate and send the entire view over that connection anytime something changes. Intuitively this felt wasteful but it turned out that with compression this works beautifully. There’s just less code in my app, and the code that’s there is less “fiddly” not having to deal with partial updates of the page.
If you’re coming from the world of SPAs, definitely check out both.
by JSR_FDED - > htmx 2.0 (like htmx 1.0 & intercooler.js 1.0) will be supported in perpetuity, so there is absolutely no pressure to upgrade your application: if htmx 2.0 is satisfying your hypermedia needs, you can stick with it
This is commendable, specially during times when libraries and programs aren't afraid of breaking changes and API churn.
by gr4vityWall - > So, eventually & reluctantly, I have changed my mind: there will be another major version of htmx.
> However, in order to keep my word that there will not be a htmx 3.0, the next release will instead be htmx 4.0.
technically correct.. the best kind of correct
by booi