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Comment by Devasta | Hacker News Reader

HTMX is like a glimpse into the road not taken, where HTML is the main language of the web instead of JS. Sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side, and I hope as an industry we make the switch.

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My cynical take: this is by design. Those web committees are staffed by companies that each have their non-web platform they're pushing (or were, until it died, see Microsoft), so even the most well meaning members are somehow contorted into compromises that make the web as a platform a bad technical choice in terms of actual design, but the best one in terms of flexibility and of course ubiquity.

It's completely stupid HTML, by default, doesn't have basic controls found in EVERY UI toolkit since circa 1980. The standard examples being ListView and TreeView.

> It's completely stupid HTML, by default, doesn't have basic controls found in EVERY UI toolkit since circa 1980. The standard examples being ListView and TreeView.

This is one of my greatest frustrations with the web as a platform. These controls are so basic they should just be there, eliminating the need to sift through dozens of third-party implementations all with wildly varying feature sets, performance profiles, framework compatibility, levels of upkeep, etc to find one that works for your project.

Well, they're not, and I can't find any good reason for why they aren't, when we're putting entire GPUs languages in there, except for the fact that somewhere in the HQ of one or more of those companies guiding web standards there is a discussion that goes something like:

Web Platform Dev: Boss, can we add TreeView to HMTL?

Web Platform Boss: Sounds cool, what are the advantages and disadvantages of doing this?

Web Platform Dev: Advantage: cross platform widget that's going to be super useful to many developers, replacing 3rd party ones of varying quality. Disadvantage: would take N months to implement and M years to have full adoptions, and yeah, it would probably increase adoption of the web platform, maybe even on mobile platform, where there is a chance that indirectly we will lose about $1-2bn per year from our walled garden, coupled with other web platform enhancements we should also make, regarding progressive web apps, local storage, etc.

Walled Garden Boss: Hey, SVP, can we please FIRE Web Platform Dev and Web Platform Boss as what they said amounts to a 2% drop in our share price?

Don’t attribute to malice… Many people working on frontend came from application or backend development and preferred the JavaScript model to a more declarative one. Not understanding enough the document context that drives the web. This makes everything more fragile and slow but hey “functionality” wins over everything else in todays world.

This doesn't explain ListView and TreeView. Or the lack of a DatePicker widget.

Look at Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, Gtk, Qt.

Which of those doesn't have these widgets?

I'm tired of defending mega corps with thousands of employees with IQs through the roof, working on this for decades. It has to be latent malice. Banality of evil, if you will.

It is possible for normal everyday people to make contributions to the standards. I'm sure if you created a patch that showed these things working in firefox/webkit/chrome and wrote up a proposal and sent it to the correct listserv, you would at least have something more than baseless conspiracy to be mad about

I'm not a C dev and it's not my job to do something when people are literally paid for this stuff, a lot more than me. Every mainstream OS has what I'm talking about.

I believe he makes some good arguments that we really still need both, but HTML could be more powerful and allow for less JS.

This is a good essay on the topic: https://htmx.org/essays/when-to-use-hypermedia/

Definitely one place htmx can be abused is oob-swap: https://htmx.org/attributes/hx-swap-oob/, which allows any given HTMX request to replace any part of the page. It sort of destroys the concept of locality of concern that HTMX pushes for.

One example of this is the lack of an include-tag that could fetch a fragment from the server (useful for headers/footers). Developers have wanted it for decades and have been forced to reproduce the functionality themselves using frames and/or javascript.

https://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/

The W3C specced out such a tag nearly 20 years ago, but because the browser devs are terrified of all things XML it was never implemented.

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