vanilla-teuxdeux VS htmx

A few years back I stumbled into something a bit more complex, still done in pure js, just for the hell of it: https://github.com/morris/vanilla-todo

And then wrote my own version, with code a lot closer to modern react, with undo/redo and other niceties - https://github.com/ivank/vanilla-teuxdeux

And what I leaned is that is astonishingly easy to write code that would be understandable to people coming from the redux crowd. Maybe that’s because redux is just such a simple concept in and off itself - a glorified switch on a big object. And it’s also quite easy to hack a simple version of vdom to make it all work.

What’s missing from all those vanilla js efforts though turned out to be testability. There is a ton of code in the modern js world just to allow you to mock/test your components, and thats for me the real tragedy of vanilla js.

I have no idea why W3C crowd have not invested into standardizing js tests in all these years…

Kinda like restarting windows to fix it, rather than figuring out whats wrong.

And you could get quite far that way. 37signal’s basecamp was like that - an html app with vanilla js sprinkled throughout. Worked great.

But there is a limit in complexity. JS and html are great for building websites, but if you want to build an actual application, you need to be really clever and accept a lot of limitations. React just lifts the ceiling of what you can do, without being all to complicated.

And you can use the technics of react without react itself too, once you understand what it is all about - https://github.com/ivank/vanilla-teuxdeux

Recently I went on a deep dive to test for myself if it’s even possible to write a modern looking web application with no build tools or dependencies, and turns out its very doable - https://github.com/ivank/vanilla-teuxdeux

Web tech has gone a long way and gives us a ton of stuff for free, without the need to reimplement it all in JS. Though the apis themselves are often rather awkward.

Sadly, the biggest missing piece in all of it though is testing.

Hah last year I did my case study of building an app with only web tech - no dependencies, build steps etc. - https://github.com/ivank/vanilla-teuxdeux

Figured out virtual dom is the one big missing piece to make webdev workable without any dependencies at all.

I can see other people are getting to similar conclusions:)

HTMX is another library that gained popularity due to its server-first approach to rendering data, although seeking a much simpler way of appealing to developers.

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)