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Comment by yakshaving_jgt | Hacker News Reader

That's really cool! I didn't know about this. Thanks for sharing.

How do you handle reflecting the new state in the UI though? Do you just use JavaScript anyway?

I have a form which looks like a toggle, and interacting with the toggle initiates a POST request. If the server responds with a 204, the UI doesn't actually update to reflect the new toggled state. I'm not sure how to work around this.

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Could you do something like "<form action="#sent">" and use the ":target" CSS pseudo-class on an element with a message?

I don't think so. I think the form needs to still point to the URI which is expecting the POST request. Maybe I'm not imagining hard enough, but I don't think this approach will work.

Furthermore, according to this article[0], the `:target` approach is viable when it's acceptable to change the browser history, whereas in my case that is exactly what I'm trying to avoid.

[0]: https://css-tricks.com/css-target/

> Maybe I'm not imagining hard enough, but I don't think this approach will work.

I've never heard this turn of phrase before, but I really like it.

In my general use, often it was cases where you either didn’t need to or just some minor `:active` styling was enough.

We also did just use some JS to for instance hide the button. Our goal wasn't to avoid JS perse, just AJAX wasn't really a thing yet.

I can't think of a solution to this either, but there are also other ways of doing non-refreshing requests sending by toggling background-images, loading=lazy <img> and so on

There is the risk however of getting a bit too clever with this, and violating the principle of least astonishment.

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