from Hacker News

Complexity bad: An interview with Htmx creator Carson Gross

by floobertoober on 3/14/24, 3:14 AM with 15 comments

• by throwaway284534 on 3/14/24, 11:50 AM

  I just don’t buy how this is a productive way to build websites. Having the functionality of HTMX natively supported would be nice but you’d still need much of what React does. HTMX’s docs seem to hand wave away front-end state management as something that no longer applies. Simultaneously, they also assume that every API you interact with will return HTML partials.

  What could convince anyone to abandon the rich and bountiful lands of JSX and TypeScript? Who would prefer to move into a write-only and stringly typed HTML that competes with PHP for the slot of least performant debugging experience?

  Maybe the answer is in the question…

• by chuckadams on 3/14/24, 3:28 PM

  There's nothing about htmx that would make me choose it over my preferred framework of VueJS, but I am very supportive of its central premise: that anchors and form actions should be able to target their output at the granularity of individual elements, not just entire documents. I think it would be a common-sense evolution to the HTML standard, along with scoped ids.

• by imjonse on 3/14/24, 9:20 AM

  I have been meaning to try Htmx out. Realising its author wrote 'grug brained developer' suddenly makes it a lot more attractive.

• by rjzzleep on 3/14/24, 10:16 AM

  I often meet dev shops trying to sell me on a whole dev team for their next,nuxt whatever stack, so I always tell people that it makes no sense to start with that stack. But for all the stimulus, livewire, htmx micro frameworks, htmx seems to be the one that has the least amount of documentation which can make it quite painful to work with at times.

  It just seems like Django has a lot less documentation than all the other frameworks. I wonder why that is.

• by nsonha on 3/14/24, 3:08 PM

  "Complexity bad so let's do complexity in a different way"