Comment by vlz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vlz | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't want to bring politics into this, but I find the hype behind HTMX eerily similar to the populist vibes I get reading what their voters write.

Funnily I get quite irrationally conservative vibes the other way around. People clinging to their tools. All this complexity I learned must have been for a reason! We are building webapps for a reason (and that reason is valid for absolutely everybody and their use case)! "You youngsters do not remember the bad old days when everything was made of spaghetti, never again!"

Fortunately this is not a struggle for democracy but only a quibble in web development.

Your abstractions live either in the frontend or in the backend. For most cases, either will be quite fine.

> All this complexity I learned must have been for a reason!

It doesn't have to be so emotional.

Htmx can be helpful to keep all your state in one place, it's simpler to reason about and make changes. Lower cognitive load for the system is better for smaller teams and particularly lone developers.

You can accomplish the same thing by going full front end and minimize backend code with a similar small library that takes care of most to all of it for you.

Living in the front end, with all app state in the front end, has distinct advantages. Lower latency for interaction. Lower server costs. Offline capable. It has some cons like slower initial render. If you don't like JavaScript, JavaScript.

> Lower latency for interaction.

Unless you are optimistic in your approach, that isn't true, both have to talk to the back end.

> Lower server costs.

Not necessarily. It depends on what language on the back end you're using and how your front end code is working. If it is making the API calls anyway then the cost should be the same, or close to the same.

> Offline capable.

Offline support with HATEOS:

https://github.com/jon49/WeightTracker

Progressively enhanced (No JS needed all the way to offline support) with partial offline support:

https://github.com/jon49/cash

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