Htmf Alternatives

htmf reviews and mentions

• HTML First – Six principles for building simple, maintainable, web software
  13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023

  I've successfully used this pattern (HTMX hypermedia style) to create an offline-first web app SPA[^1]. One of the pages is pretty dynamic and I wasn't sure if I would need a traditional front end library to work with it. But, nope, hypermedia to the win, it worked fine without a front end framework.

  To build it I used my own library called HTMF[^2]. I started out using mpa-enhancer[^3] but found that that pattern is a little to janky sometimes. I think reloading a page every time on every interaction uses too many resources for a browser especially when you use a phone that doesn't have as much power as a laptop.

  But overall I find the pattern very easy to use and keeps the complexity down.

  I think some of the issues with traditional SPAs is that they have a lot of state and state is nonlinear in complexity. But using templating systems makes the complexity more linear in nature.

  Also, I find libraries like React to be overly complex for what it does, see above. The way React works is just odd and counter intuitive. All for problems that are easy to solve. I do think there are places for a React-like library is needed but those are for websites that are inherently highly state-based. But most websites aren't state-based even ones that appear to be state-based at first.

  The websites I work on are usually just forms and forms are pretty powerful and can get you a long ways before you need to go outside of that paradigm.

  [^1]: https://github.com/jon49/Soccer

  [^2]: https://github.com/jon49/htmf

  [^3]: https://github.com/jon49/mpa-enhancer

• Things you forgot because of React
  14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Aug 2023
• Htmx, WebAssembly, Rust, ServiceWorker Proof of Concept
  12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Oct 2022
• Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Oct 2022

  I wrote a js lib similar to HTMX, which I call HTMF[1]. Unlike HTMX I try to stay as close to the metal of the current semantics as possible. So, all interactions are based off of forms. I also tried to keep the wording similar to HTML/JS semantics. It's pretty small lib but pretty amazing how far I can get with it. These days I mainly build offline-first apps with it. But I built it in such a way that it can easily be a progressive enhancement to an MPA app.

  [1]: https://github.com/jon49/htmf

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