Mithril.js VS htm

I don’t enjoy React much, but (as I’ve commented before) I do love Mithril (https://mithril.js.org). Immediate-mode UI via a vDOM, like React, but small, simple, and with none of the reactivity complications. I’d never go back to building apps with pure JS.

You can find more information about Mithril.js on its official website.

The idea of nested function calls to build HTML is not new. Back in the hey-day of JS frameworks, this was a common vdom pattern. I kinda miss [MithrilJS](https://mithril.js.org/#dom-elements)

I have mixed feelings about React. I like it better than jQuery, and better than other JS frameworks I’ve used.

But I much prefer Mithril (https://mithril.js.org/), which offers the same immediate-mode advantages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19746235) but without the crazy complex dependency-tracking reactivity.

I rather liked this comment on React: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38640051

Vue with Vite (the builder/runner) is a stable, open source option. It is really a lightweight start where you're mostly writing HTML with interpolated data, and Vue is updating values correctly and performantly. Just build your reactive HTML app in one file and break into separate components as you're feeling the spirit. https://vuejs.org/guide/quick-start

Mithril if you just want to drop in want a tiny, complete reactive library that doesn't require a build step--this one is most like what you might end up creating in a large jQuery app. You can understand everything from the homepage. https://mithril.js.org/

HTMX if you really like HTML conventions. This doesn't feel jQuery-like and depends on your approach to your server app. https://htmx.org/

React is still has gratuitous complexity. If you need some React like, take a look at mithril which is simpler and much smaller.

The submitter creating multiple var -> let PRs (one PR per file), was also doing this in other projects, and would've broken some of their users.

https://github.com/MithrilJS/mithril.js/pull/2880#pullreques...

And he created multiple PRs there too. And didn't follow their workflow...

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.