htm VS htmx

The preact team also dislikes transpiling jsx so they've developed an alternative using tagged template literals: https://github.com/developit/htm

So getting this to work without bundler magic is very hard. It's not surprising why NextJS is investing in a bundler. Though one thing that really sticks out is how much complexity we add for just miniscule dev ergonomics. Not using JSX and using something like htm would make all this easier (removing the bundler entirely), it's a lot of overhead to avoid a couple of quotes. React should really have a tagged-template mode. Also all of this is indirection is actually bad for dev ergonomics too! One of the reasons I did this is because I'm absolutely sick of magic caches and sorting through code that's been crushed by a bundler into something I don't recognize and can't easily debug. While we can't get rid of this completely (ts/jsx) this preserves the module import graph completely on the client-side making it easy to find things as you are working and preserving line numbers. This obviously is not useful for a production build and there's a lot of work that would need to go in to support both modes over the same code, but it's depressing no tools really work like this for local development.

You can also do JSX and skip the build step with preact + htm : https://github.com/developit/htm#example

While I was able to achieve this fairly easily, the developer experience of manually stitching strings together wasnt great. Being myself a fan of buildless libraries, such as htm and lit-html, I figured I'd try to take a stab at implementing a DSL for component-like templating in Service Workers myself, called Service Worker Templating Language (SWTL), here's what it looks like:

I would however highly recommend https://github.com/developit/htm

I thought the same thing, but apparently "HTM" is a JSX like javascript string template representation of HTML, and it can be found here: https://github.com/developit/htm

If you're going to do a no-build approach, assume modern JS (so you don't have to transpile the JS syntax). Also, you can use https://github.com/developit/htm as a nearly-identical equivalent to JSX syntax, also without transpiling.

This seems like a case of caring way too much about something that's hardly very different. JSX versus tagged template strings can be incredibly similar to one another.

The examples in this article are using vanilla template strings to author raw html, but that only misses a couple of nicities JSX has. There are tagged template string libraries like htm[1] that do include some of the few nicities JSX has, but which are actually compatible with the official language.

[1] https://github.com/developit/htm

The first one exists in JavaScript and is called Tagged Template Literals. I agree with the author that its a nice feature. It's the perfect construct to use for prepared SQL statements, LINQ-style queries, or reimplementing a JSX-like syntax (see HTM https://github.com/developit/htm).

There is however a library that is closer to JSX (HTML-like feel) but yet does not require a build step. htm. HTM uses tagged templates to leverage template literal as native Javascript template strings. If you have not played with tagged templates, I encourage you to check this out, it's a quite powerful feature, that has recently become a part of Javascript.

When I work with HTMX I need isolated component that can be reusable a form. So I create a PHP Function that generate the Input Datalist.

I was inspired by htmz (which was in turn inspired by htmx) and how the author got pretty close to a basic htmx-like experience just using an iframe. I wanted to push it a little further so whipped this demo together. My submission demonstrates progressive enhancement for the form - with js enabled the request targets an iframe that is inserted into the dom, meaning the page doesn't actually navigate (similar to event.preventDefault()). The iframe receives the html response from the request and on load triggers a function to swap out it's contents into the main page.

As described on htmx.org: "htmx gives you access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext"

Apart from the source code itself, the repo's README also gives a bit more details about the various packages I used.

1. htmx: https://htmx.org/

Also, there’s some response header juggling you have to do when submitting forms that have a validation step before redirecting: https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/issues/369

I’ve tried to iron out any footguns or server requirements I’ve bumped into while using HTMX & Hotwire in my projects.

✨ In recent months, I have been developing web projects using GOTTHA stack: Go + Templ + Tailwind CSS + htmx + Alpine.js. As soon as I'm ready to talk about all the subtleties and pitfalls, I'll post it on my social networks.

I've been digging into HTMX lately (using Python web frameworks) and find the concepts and approach to be interesting and promising. The idea of hypermedia driven systems over the current practice of JavaScript based frameworks (I never really got into React, played with Vue, and enjoy Svelte/SvelteKit) and the ability to chose your language/framework for the backend while primarily leveraging HTML/CSS on the frontend just seems refreshing.

Apparently it changed from 2-clause BSD: https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/commit/e16f1865a494b6...

(The zero clause license drops the requirements for preserving the copyright notice when distributing)

It would be a sin not to start with something that prides itself on being the front-end library of peace. HTMX skyrocketed in popularity in 2023, gaining most of its GitHub stars during the past year. HTMX is not your average JS framework. If you work in HTMX, you will spend most of your time in the world of hypermedia, looking at web development from a completely different pair of eyes as compared to our usual JS-heavy outlook on modern web development. HTMX leverages the power of the concept of HATEOAS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State), enabling developers to access browser features directly from HTML, instead of using Javascript.