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  • Hacker News
  • I made the switch to HTMX recently After 12+ years of building web apps with Javascript and its been nice. I always hated the build complexity of modern Javascript, so much tooling, dependencies and packages to get basic functionality.
    by buildwrangler
  • Amazing... an HTMX thread without any haters interjecting or critics telling everyone why HTMX wont work.

    Even React-aholics have to tip their hats to a Game Boy release.

    by andy800
  • Crazy how much things have shifted since a few years ago
    by sroerick
  • hello all, we are releasing htmx 4.0 on the Game Boy and Gameboy Color (thank you rcy for submitting)

    it is a real, honest-to-goodness mario-bros inspired GameBoy game with four levels over three biomes ending in a slop factory where you battle final boss warren buffering (an online character I beef with, we are friends)

    if you beat him it unlocks the source code for htmx 4.0

    game was written by Stephen Mitchell (aka scum) by hand, using GBStudio w/heavy customizations, hoping to get an essay by him up soon talking about the creation of the game

    carts were produced w/the expertise of Jarason Banes who also did the cover design. Cover art is by Ash (https://www.fiverr.com/ae1996/) who also did the soft-cover art for https://hypermedia.systems

    Hope you find it enjoyable if you get a copy and at least find it funny if you don't :)

    by recursivedoubts
  • This is too funny, how could I not?
    by asploder
  • My hat's off to you for finding and shouting out an artist to complete the look!
    by mossTechnician
  • Wait but where do we get a gameboy?
    by WD-42
  • Is it a real physical cartridge? How do you get the source code off the cartridge at the end? Or does it give you a passcode to a git repo or…like an NFT with access to the source?
    by iamwil
  • Amazing, can’t wait to see the first unboxing / let’s play / review videos.
    by mitjam
  • Ordered... along with some other swag.

    Love HTMX, can't wait for my https://brickboy.xyz/ to arrive so I can get to work!

    by mvdwoord
  • Did you use the built in GB studio sound engine? If so that's my code :) Always enjoyable when it pops up in places like this. Looks like a fun project.
    by superdisk
  • Oh hey, I made GB Studio, really cool to see it being used for this :) I've got some nice features in progress for the next version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8UKwV1gJAI
    by chrismaltby
  • While I am not particularly a fan of HTMX, I do absolutely adore how Carson and the team always have such a great sense of humor with the project.

    I used HTMX in a few projects, and the library worked well enough for what I needed, but I found it to be a bit too limiting compared to accomplishing the same task in Vanilla JS (my go-to).

    by hirvi74
  • Is it true that the person who authored the "Grug-brained developer" essay also created HTMX?
    by factorialboy
  • he wrote the Lulu book
    by homarp
  • yep
    by recursivedoubts
  • What I don't like about Htmx is, that it is still a JS framework, without good automatic fallbacks for a noscript situation. This leads to web devs thinking it would be great to do all the things in Htmx, even if all they have is a static page with static content.

    Just recently I looked at hosting an old school forum. I don't want to load all the PHP and MySQL baggage on my server or even run it in docker, so I looked for Python solutions. Found PunkwebBB. Was happy for a short time with it, until I tested it more in depth with no scripts. Unfortunately, while it has some good fallbacks in some places, it doesn't have them everywhere and some buttons just don't do anything without JS. It also uses Htmx. Completely unnecessary JS, considering the function of the buttons.

    I considered forking it. But the amount of work to remove the needless JS, and repair it ...

    So now I am building my own forum completely without JS, and with Python Django doing a lot of heavy lifting.

    by zelphirkalt
  • This is exactly why I prefer Turbo ( https://turbo.hotwired.dev/ ).

    Turbo comes from a progressive-enhancement philosophy: start with proper HTML and add richer behaviour on top. HTMX is a JavaScript library in much the same sense that React is. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it makes this anti-pattern easier to fall into.

    Honestly, “the site should work without JavaScript” is no longer the strongest argument. Server-rendered, semantic HTML matters more for accessibility, SEO, and increasingly for LLMs and other automated tools.

    Of course, you can write excellent HTML with HTMX. It just requires more discipline—or enough experience to recognize when you are quietly building a JavaScript application in HTML attributes.

    by cientifico
  • Htmx is actually quite good at graceful degradation IF you stick to hx-boost for most interactions. See https://dev.to/yawaramin/why-hx-boost-is-actually-the-most-i...
    by yawaramin
  • PunkwebBB maintainer here. This is good feedback. The only thing that really does need HTMX/JS on PunkwebBB is the shoutbox polling, which you can opt out of anyway. But you're right that there should be non JS fallbacks in place of modals and other small htmx interactions. I'll get on this.
    by punkweb
  • I get the point but I do feel like Htmx's whole design is a big automatic fallback... If some browsers will never be able to understand the hx-get/post/etc attribs, you can just design the initial html you send over around that.
    by beepbooptheory
  • Indeed. And the amusing/disappointing/frustrating thing is: my next.js site works if you turn off JS. Links are server-rendered as links, HTML is server-rendered as HTML. If you visit one of the tools that run on the client then they won't work, but the pages that could be static content? They're static content.

    Or at least they were, until I started using cache components the other week, and I'd not noticed they'd regressed. That's frustrating. Give me a few minutes...

    by andrewaylett
  • > So now I am building my own forum completely without JS, and with Python Django doing a lot of heavy lifting.

    Later this year I will be releasing Misago 0.40, which is a near complete rewrite from React.js to HTMX, with rest of features to follow in 2027. And yes, noscripy support is part of it.

    https://misago-project.org/t/removing-reactjs-from-the-codeb...

    by Ralfp
  • It's too bad Htmx isn't just the native behavior of HTML, implemented in a cross-platform standard, that does not need to rely on Javascript in user space code. It could just be part of the browser. It should have been part of the browser.

    It's awesome, I'm not criticizing Htmx at all to be clear, I am criticizing our seemingly inability to advance the core web technology of HTML in browsers to include this kind of tech natively.

    If somebody from the WhatWG, e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Opera, and Mozilla, etc. wants to embrace and support the creators of Htmx and wrap this into the browser natively, I will proudly retract my comment.

    by sixdimensional
  • Thank you to the HTMX-folks for keeping software fun! I've been a happy HTMX user and Grug essay forwarder since it first made the rounds here on HN. This was an instant purchase :)
    by gen220
  • Ooh, I didn't know the creator of htmx was also the author of the Grug Brained Developer! [0][1]

    TIL. Thanks! Now all the Grug references in the shop make sense, as well as the wisdom and overall vibe of the htmx project :)

    [0] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2336201/complexity-bad-an-...

    [1] https://grugbrain.dev/

    by gawa
  • HTMX is awesome. I've replaced several OSS web apps on my home server with HTMX + Go + PostgreSQL replacements. The results are lightweight, responsive, work great on desktop and mobile alike, all with the absolute minimum complexity required. The codebases are easy to understand and modify, and so far I'm going months between updates (mostly just minor bugfixes for my applications). I fully expec my mature apps will go years if not decades between required upgrades.
    by throw2ih020
  • <please don't take this too seriously>

    That's great but I believe it's still over-engineered. Unless it's a web site that can tolerate no downtime at all during schema updates, SQLite in WAL2 mode is more than enough. Moreover, in Postgres version upgrades can't be done without significant downtime (or setting up replication and performing a complex dance), so even that isn't so cut and dry.

    </ ... >

    by nasretdinov
  • How does introducing a third layer reduce complexity?
    by robertoandred
  • Are any of these open source? I've gone down the go/htmx/pg path lightly a few times and I haven't loved the feel of it, but maybe I'm doing it wrong. I think just server side templating just starts feeling icky in go so maybe I'm just missing a good pattern or library.
    by nicpottier