dream-html VS idiomorph

There is some truth to this. Imho the next level of htmx is unlocked when you componentize everything like a React app...but with nested routes corresponding to nested components like a Remix app...and using an HTML generation DSL embedded directly in your language, so HTML becomes a first-class citizen of your language's constructs, rather than a templated afterthought. I have a demo of this: https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html/tree/todoapp/app

Nowadays I highly recommend HTML embedding libraries directly in the programming language. E.g. ScalaTags https://com-lihaoyi.github.io/scalatags/ or (my own) https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html

Yes, you give up the ability of designers and frontend-only people to easily work with the HTML templates. But in exchange you get quite a lot.

I found your article very informative and it matches up quite a bit with my own thinking about HTML generation. In fact it looks like we independently arrived at pretty much the same conclusions. A lot of the issues you raise are the impetus behind the way I designed my HTML-generation DSL: https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html

I am developing an HTML generation library on top of Dream, to have great support in the language including htmx support: https://yawaramin.github.io/dream-html/dream-html/Dream_html/index.html

Look at this code which prints out an HTML tag: https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html/blob/main/lib/dream_...

Initially you might think generating HTML tags from data structures in code should be a simple matter. But there are complexities--some tags are defined as having no child tags, others do. Some tags are purely character data (unstructured text), not structured data. Some are just comments. We need a way to compose multiple tags together into a single 'virtual' tag for flexible HTML generation. All these conditions can be pretty hard to keep track of--unless your compiler does exhaustiveness checking. Then the compiler will tell you if you missed any cases.

In the example above I didn't make any manual effort to cover all the cases, I simple listed out the cases I wanted to handle in order. The compiler made sure that I didn't miss any.

in plain htmx, you can target an area that doesn't disrupt a playing video (e.g. the comments box appending to the comments) or you can use a morphing algorithm that disrupts the DOM less.

i have my own morphing algorithm (and a corresponding htmx plugin that allows you to use it) called idiomorph:

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/idiomorph/

i've also been working with the chrome team to get a feature added they are calling "atomic moves":

https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/1255

this would allow us to move elements around in the DOM without losing things like play state or focus or whatever

very excited for this last idea, I think it will be a huge boon for the web in general, not just for htmx

for htmx 2.0 i'm integrating this functionality into the core

it's based on the head morphing algorithm of idiomorph:

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/idiomorph/

which 37Signals is going to integrate into Turbo for v8:

https://twitter.com/ben_pylo/status/1717975035669876790

[1] - https://htmx.org/essays/locality-of-behaviour/

i certainly hope not

the 2.0 would drop IE support, remove the older SSE and WebSocket support, and switch a couple of defaults (e.g, using template wrapping for parsing partial content, which handles troublesome elements like table rows better, but isn't available in IE) so it would be a breaking change (not for most folks, but still, breaking for some) which I only like to do w/ major versions.

we may have one major addition: a morph swap based on idiomorph:

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/idiomorph/

i'm on the fence on that one: it is currently available as an extension and maybe doesn't belong in the core, still thinking about it

so, in comparison with most libraries, 2.0 is going to be very minor

maybe I'm too close to it, but htmx feels like a hack to address things that really should be part of the HTML spec

if browsers got into the game I would assume they could do things much faster and integrate things like preload (https://htmx.org/extensions/preload/) and idiomorph (https://github.com/bigskysoftware/idiomorph/) much more cleanly w/ the rest of the browser infrastructure

idiomorph:

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/idiomorph

it's an updated take on the DOM morphing algorithm of morphdom, and it uses what i call "ID sets" to allow the morphing algorithm to "see" children in the DOM when making morphing decisions in the parents, which means you don't need to annotate the DOM with as many ids

here is a demo showing how it outperforms morphdom when ids are sparse/deep:

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/idiomorph#demo

my trick for making the `htmx:confirm` event act like it is blocking:

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/blob/a3c414dcee94fd03...

basically, redesign the arguments for a function such that I can call it again at a given spot with one parameter changed and, to a first order approximation, it acts as if the function is resumable.

I've used this hack in many places now, just recently in idiomorph to allow head elements to load before the rest of the content is morphed:

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/idiomorph/blob/e6dfc189fa3...

That being said, htmx is about 3000 lines of mostly-understandable JavaScript. Really, the only two somewhat ugly parts of the code are history support and the somewhat fancy swapping model that enables CSS transitions. And it's basically baked at this point. I plan on adding a merge-style swap (https://github.com/bigskysoftware/idiomorph), better head merging and cleaning up some rough edges in htmx 2.0, but the core API shouldn't change at all and for most people 2.0 will be the same as a point release. At that point, htmx will be done done, and just another tool to use when building websites.