Why I use htmx
I recently introduced this notion of the “AHA Stack” - a set of tools I’ve been using with great satisfaction to create things on the Web.
A big, probably the most novel, thing in the AHA Stack is the H
part: htmx.
htmx is a super interesting library.
Indie (not provided to you by a FAANG), simple, written in a single JavaScript file in ~3800 lines with no build step, htmx defines itself as an “extension of HTML”.
It brings a few brilliant ideas.
In particular I can mention it makes it possible that:
- any HTML element can initiate an HTTP request (not just forms or links)
- any event can trigger an HTTP request
- you can use all HTTP methods (PUT, DELETE, PATCH) declaratively in addition to GET (forms and links) and POST (available only to forms in HTML)
Those 3 ideas alone are genius.
Plus, we have the biggest change in thinking compared to traditional JS frameworks: you ship HTML over the wire.
Using those ideas I can create interactions and experiences that would otherwise require me to write a ton of JavaScript, depend on a big pile of JavaScript dependencies and hundreds of npm packages, to execute a ton of JavaScript on the client side.
It’s a brilliant little library, with no dependencies, that you install through a script tag. It’s backend-agnostic.
We use htmx to handle client-server HTTP communication once the page is loaded.
So for example the user clicks a link, and we load some data from the server, which we get back as HTML, and we add it to the page dynamically.
And we do this in a way that’s declarative.
Not imperatively writing JavaScript to tell the page what to do, instead, we go up a level of abstraction, and declare what we want it to do.
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