Comment by superkuh
2 days ago
Sure. There's that. But it doesn't progressively enhance. It doesn't even fail gracefully. It's just... nothing without JS. That's bad accessibility. For for-profit and institutional use cases that's fine. But if you're a human person and want to make a website that all human persons around the world can read, it's a bad fit.
That's incorrect. Htmx actually works really well with progressive enhancement, thanks to hx-boost. See https://dev.to/yawaramin/why-hx-boost-is-actually-the-most-i...
If you stick to GET and POST requests, you can ensure your app works almost exactly the same with or without JavaScript.
Thanks for pointing out a mitigation. I'm confused though. How does "htmx sends a request header HX-Request: true with every request." happen without javascript? And does this imply you need a backend server that understands whatever this header is for the graceful fallback? Ie, it wouldn't work with just nginx...
> How does "htmx sends a request header HX-Request: true with every request." happen without javascript?
It doesn't. If JavaScript is disabled, this header is not sent.
> you need a backend server that understands whatever this header is for the graceful fallback
Yes, as I mentioned in my blog post linked earlier: 'the backend server can use a fairly simple heuristic to figure out that it should respond with a fragment:...The request has a header HX-Request...The request does not have a header HX-History-Restore-Request...If these two conditions are fulfilled, it can respond with a fragment. Otherwise, it can respond with a full page ie <!DOCTYPE html>... and so on.'
> it wouldn't work with just nginx...
It would in a limited sense if you design the pages in a certain way and use the `hx-select` attribute: https://htmx.org/attributes/hx-select/
But...htmx is not really meant to work with just Nginx or other static web servers, it is meant to work with a BFF (backend-for-frontend) that specifically knows how to serve and handle the app in question.
From the criteria you have mentioned so far:
- Works without JavaScript
- Works with a static web server like Nginx
I can only conclude that you are talking about serving static sites with no dynamic interactivity. That's not really what htmx is about. Htmx is more like a simplified way to do SPA-like things.
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