Sorry, I’m Not Diggin’ HTMX
I know I’m one to always rain on somebody’s parade when it comes to emerging tech, but since I first heard of HTMX, I wasn’t a fan.
I think it has something to do with the fact that HTMX describes itself as “a library that allows you to access modern browser features directly from HTML, rather than using JavaScript” but the first step in using HTMX is to include a JavaScript library:
<script src="https://unpkg.com/htmx.org@1.9.10" integrity="sha384-D1Kt99CQMDuVetoL1lrYwg5t+9QdHe7NLX/SoJYkXDFfX37iInKRy5xLSi8nO7UC" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
What would have made me more impressed was if they used a language other than JavaScript to do it. For example, something like Blazor, which uses WebAssembly, or Brython, which while technically is still JavaScript, but is written with Python. I can appreciate out-of-the-box solutions, but claiming you’re not using JavaScript, while using JavaScript, made me wonder if this was some kind of joke about the ever growing number of JavaScript libraries.
Unfortunate spoiler: it is not.
But, that was enough to make me shrug off the idea of HTMX. However, I keep hearing about it, all over X…