Hypermedia Systems

HTMX doc is good as a reference, but not as a tutorial.

This book is the missing tutorial, and it's been very useful to me. It even lead to the "A little taste of HTMX" series (https://www.bitecode.dev/p/a-little-taste-of-htmx-part-1).

After a year of using HTMX, I really like it and would encourage everybody to give it a try.

It's nice for:

- internal tools

- midly dynamic websites

It's not great for any web page you stay a long time on mobile on, though. I made a web app with it, and on my phone, you can't handle the fact the browser plays against you if you stay a long time with a tab open and goes in and out of the app. You really need a lot of control in JS for that.

Also: don't try to avoid JS using it. It's a mistake many people do, and that's not how you get the best out of it.

I regularly sparkle a little vanilla js or alpine in my htmx websites to make them nicer. And in some cases, I even have one lone page that loads a full vue/react because that particular section needs to be way more dynamic. It's not an XOR. You have now a whole spectrum of how dynamic and how much work you want to put in.

Sometimes, I don't write JS at all, but it's not a requirement.

In between being laid off and recently finding a new job recently, I worked my way through this book and built a website using htmx.

It was such a pleasant experience compared to the frontend work I'd been doing in react. I never felt like htmx got in the way, it just worked and I almost never needed to think about it. I spent all my time solving problems and learning CSS.

Thanks for writing the book and making it free!

hello hn, i'm one of the authors of hypermedia systems

this is a book about how hypermedia systems work in general, and how htmx (augmenting the standard web hypermedia system) and hyperview (a novel mobile hypermedia) work specifically

it's available free online, or for purchase via kindle or hardcover

hope people find it useful

No one appreciates this tide reversal back towards hateoas principles and semantic HTML more than me, but why does it always come with prescriptions to adopt some new tech? You can implement all this stuff using literally any framework from the past 15 years if you want.

Feels like a missed opportunity that the online version of the book isnt a demo of hypermedia in itself? Maybe a serious student of htmx could (as a learning exercise) transcribe the book from asciidoc into htmx? :-)

Besides technical merit [1] in this era of tech hypes, manias and virality it helps to engineer some gee-wow moments... 2 cents.

[1] (that htmx and friends definitely have, reminding us once again that "any fool can make something complicated but it takes a genius to make it simple")

I found Hypermedia Systems to be useful. Bought the hard copy as support/thank you to the authors, but the entire book is free online at hypermedia.systems. The documentation & essays on htmx.org further explain what you see in the book.

htmx is a straightforward, simple-to-implement javascript library that brings HATEOAS to the top of your development mindset. You can disagree with the HATEOAS philosophy, but the reasoning and purpose of the approach is clearly and professionally explained by the authors.

Yes, the gorilla marketing on x.com may rub some the wrong way, but frankly, it's fun. Humor and a useful product, with a deep rationale & good documentation, are wins in my book.

HTMX is not perfect and there are many situations when you probably don't want to use it, but I think it should be considered the default answer to the question: What framework should I learn to build a dynamic frontend?

At the moment the answer to that question is "react" and while react can be cool (I've heard) it has developed into a complex world that requires quite some time to master. Even intuitive JS frameworks like Svelte have been getting a lot bigger in order to be more feature complete.

HTMX is the Pareto answer to building dynamic frontends. It will be great for 80% of all projects that require interactivity while doing that job in 20% of the complexity that react would bring.

Some previous discussion including comments from the authors about the book project this was supposed to be:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134545

This has been one of the best books I've read about web development!

I enjoyed reading this book. It inspired me to simplify some things in the app I currently work on - and from which I earn my income.

I moved away from the front-end/React world, but until a couple of years ago, Svelte was the darling and the future of F/E development and now it's htmx.

I don't want to start another framework flamewar but was it something in particular that people stopped talking about it?

I sort of want to check this out but as someone who’s not really felt difficulty using react or a bundler I’m still not sure if it would be useful. How are the static types with something like HTMX?

What are you gonna do if you want to give a user the option to display the same search result in a html table and a map drawn on a canvas element, or maybe some info viz thing like a chart? No htmx fanboy has a nice solution for this. Im fine with making hyper media part of the synthesis but ignoring features that you have for free with modern hybrid ssr spa is not helping.