Htmx: Simplicity in an Age of Complicated Solutions

The HTMX hype vastly underestimates what a good SPA can do. Instead, HTMX re-allocates most responsibilities from the front end to the backend.

Its a good tool for teams/individuals with a high proficiency in backend tooling, and doesn't want to learn another entire ecosystem for a project. Its not equivalent to a good frontend with modern tooling.

I really loved the ideas of HTMX but when I finally used it in a project, it was still overly complicated for my needs and yet in some areas underfeatured. Vanilla Websockets + insertAdjacentHTML works pretty well for me.

I have never seen any technology that claims to be simple actually simple. Things that I consider simple actually aim to just be good and logical, then simplicity is the inevitable.

I would like to like this project because of the hype and the maintainer that is quite cool.

But I'm a little repulsed by what is proposed by this library. In my opinion there is too much imbrication and auto magic when you use that.

From experience, it always looks nice for a small example or a very simple poc, but once you have to do a real project,then the devil is in the details. And you have to deals of the subtle changes that you need to implement in addition of a simple common case.

And in such situations, what works best is when everything is clearly separated on its own side, well abstracted with decoupled interfaces.

So related to the examples he gives, I prefer when you have style, document, template on one side and the code logic, eventually related to dealing with requested segregated on its own side.

Crazy how rails pjax became an entire JavaScript framework

If we talk about simplicity, how can we forget about mighty jQuery?

    $('#searchForm').submit(() => {
        $('#resultsList').empty().load('/search?query=' + encodeURIComponent($('#searchInput').text().trim()));
        return false;
    });

Also, nothing beats the conciseness of 166-byte (!) HTMZ: https://leanrada.com/htmz/