Htmx, Raku and Pico CSS

I’ve been using htmx for over a year now for our internal management application (order monitoring, partner management, CAD model uploading and management type stuff) and I continue to be delighted at how quickly I can add features and iterate existing ones. I write way less client side JS, the app is very fast and responsive and I don’t have to write the app twice like with a SPA + API.

> I am a simple sole, ... go back to the halcyon early days of the web before Netscape dropped the JS-bomb. You know HTML for the layout and CSS for the style.

I am not sure if this is intended as humor, but JavaScript came before CSS.

> As we have seen in the previous posts, HTMX eliminates the need for JS to make dynamic web content.

Well, sort of! I suppose that for certain definitions of eliminating Javascript, this Javascript framework eliminates the need for Javascript completely.

Raku is such a fantastic, feature-laden language. Cool to see it get a (tiny) bit of HN attention!

> I am a simple sole, I want to reduce the cognitive load in my web projects. The general idea is to go back to the halcyon early days of the web before Netscape dropped the JS-bomb. You know HTML for the layout and CSS for the style. An elegant division of roles.

(I'm not quite sure if this is the author's sentiment), but the point shouldn't be to escape JS entirely, but make it into something that can be used in a repeated pattern that works in lockstep with your application, such that you are neither creating custom JS for each page (e.g. React), nor blindly manipulating the DOM (like JQuery).

The division of roles between CSS and HTML is an almost contradictory point - your styling and layout should be coupled if you are to impose any meaningful order in your design. If you are rejecting the "decoupling" of front-end and back-end that React gives you, then why would you expect to be able to do it between HTML and CSS?

HTMX, Unpoly and Twinspark are great, can't say anything about Raku.

I also really liked an idea about class-less CSS frameworks, as I was frustrated with all the `<table class="table">` and so on. Then I've tried it for one project where I had to integrate Leaflet map on a page. And it's just not possible to do with class-less CSS frameworks.

Since then I write `<table class="table">` and have zero problems with that.

The main example in this article — immediately following a section on semantic HTML — is a list of <a> tags with the hrefs all set to `#` and the hyperlink behavior emulated with htmx. So we’ve taken what would otherwise be a perfectly functional list of links, removed the most important semantic attribute, broken a bunch of behavior and rendered them useless without a ~16kb JavaScript library.

…and look, that’s an okay mistake to make — it takes time to learn this stuff — but when you also go out of the way to pine for “the halcyon early days of the web before Netscape dropped the JS-bomb” it makes it difficult to take you seriously. A list of links is, like, the most basic essence of a website; if you aren’t able to make that work without a JavaScript library, what are you even pining for?

I'm just curious if anyone is using unpoly instead of HTMX?

I know that HTMX has a much larger userbase, its main dev is well known and beloved, and the landing page doesn't look web 1.0

With that said, unpoly appears to have a similar feature set and one feature that HTMX doesn't: The ability to create modals without loading a new page.

i know tailwind wasn't created in a vacuum and solves a massive problem. but part of me does feel sad it "won" and now we all are forced to deal with it in one way or another. i remember when HTML was clean and semantic, and crawlable. there was a certain respect in that way.

Pico looks like it may be the classless styler I was looking for, thanks.

(sole = bottom of shoe

soul = spiritual part of a human)

Recently, I’ve been working with Quarkus[1], the quarkus-qute[2] (a type-safe templating engine), and htmx. I found the experience quite positive. Quarkus offers lightning-fast compilation with a hot-reloading Maven wrapper (mvnw), making development seamless. Picking up qute was straightforward, and combining it with htmx, especially with qute’s #fragment support for htmx, felt like a natural fit.

[1] https://quarkus.io/

[2] https://quarkus.io/guides/qute

For the "semantic web" part, what we've been using in my company recently , is the `<x-something>` tag which are valid html5

so except if there's a really fitting html5 tags (like footer, h1 , main ), we will have `<x-card>` `<x-avatar><img ></x-avatar>` (In case we must have an additional ) so that it's easier to convey the semantic (especially when looking in the dom inspector)

for the css we've been using tailwind (and couldn't be happier), but for personnal projects I guess picocss would be a really nice fit with `<x-semantic>` tags

Better than using HTMX - 48KB of JS - use my PHOOOS technique (https://kodus.pl) with pure HTML out-ouf-order streaming, pure CSS framework Spectre.css (https://niutech.github.io/spectre/) and a sprinkle of 166B (bytes, not KB!) HTMZ (https://leanrada.com/htmz/) for extra interactivity.

I hope you are not a sole, and have the complete human embodiment of a soul. Otherwise, yes, I agree. My one off projects use more and more cdn loaded information. I love pico, bulma and htmx.

I do believe this is still in the first half of the rococo phase and that rubble is a long way off so by all means, carry on.

Why Pico specifically? Lots of classless frameworks.

> I am a simple sole [sic]

`href=#` + JS library + config file + setting routes for each tab button doesn't feel simple

> While HTMX is well suited to 90% of this, if you are building a webapp like FaceBook […], then it’s not for you

I completely completely disagree. This is all you need.

I have been in web dev since 1999, and recently switched to a backend role.

I am never going back.

The endless thrashing on front end borders on psychosis. Something is clearly broken, and that thing is my feeble mind.