I've been using htmx for three years now, and it's completely unlocked new ways of building software for the web, especially if you use a server-side templating language.
But more importantly (as this "Game Boy" option reveals), the head honcho is really responsive with the items in the store. I had purchased a coffee mug a few years back and complained on Twitter that they need to sell larger mugs instead of only offering little tiny baby mugs that only hold ~8 ounces of liquid. The next day, he added giant 48-ounce monsters to the store and I've been drinking out of that mug every day since.
It's been massive for me as well. I would say my web developmemt is best described as dabbling in web development, and I mostly do so for websites that cater to academic interests and conference / society managment and organising. So, relativly niche.
However, I think HTMX is a beauty. Fast, simple, and doesnt come with all the bloat and BS a JS heavy / JS first deployment comes with. I can quikckly build fast and responsive sites that cost visitors very little to use/interact with.
websites have less compatability issues now, load extremely fast (google web speed score from 60-80 to flat 100), and have fewer points of failure. Debugging is a breeze. Websites are no less pretty or useful for it. In fact, they look better now because time otherwise wasted on Js BS is now free to use to tinker with / improve aesthetic, or add new features.
I'm in love with HTMX. It feels like what the web should have always been. There's absolutly zero reason a random website, without my knowledge or consent, should be running extremely heavy compute and analytics on my own device. That should never have been possible/permissible in the first place.
> I've been using htmx for three years now, and it's completely unlocked new ways of building software for the web, especially if you use a server-side templating language.
Likewise. 3 or 4 years ago, I ripped out two-thirds of all the JS in my B2B SaaS by using htmx with server-side templating. So much simpler.
The ethos of allowing a return to a simpler way of building a web app resonates with me.
This should be the way. For some reason, over time, it became harder and harder to build web apps. Tech should be about making things easier though. I don't know where we went wrong.
> it's completely unlocked new ways of building software for the web, especially if you use a server-side templating language.
Could you please expand on this point. As a “greybeard” web dev from the 2000’s era, I’d like to understand if your “unlocking” is my “that’s how it originally worked, get of my lawn”?
Yes - how you likely built websites in 2000's era (possibly with Classic ASP or PHP4 .. maybe Perl?) is the sort of websites we are addressing with HTMX.
It's bringing us back to that sort of web development but with modern tools and technology.
For the server side, we can use modern languages with better templating for html.
For the client, with htmx, you can do a lot of javascript such as ajax calls (load, trigger, etc) without writing javascript. With htmx you specify what you want to do inside html attributes.
So my actual javascript code ends up minimal.
I have been doing website dev since 2008. I've worked with PHP, C# (WebForms, MVC), a bit of python... not to mention maintaining an old website in Classic ASP.
2008-2010 I used C# WebForms. I didn't like it, but we still kept it simple, returning data from server side to html.
2010 I started to enjoy jQuery and saw potential returning data. Opened the door to provide more options for webdev.
Around 2014, I've started disagreeing with "modern website development" learning knockoutjs, requirejs, to eventually angularjs, npm's, etc. Sure, I learned and pushed forward but websites seemed to become more a chore and bloat overtime. Personally, I've not really invested in React.
I was starting to go round full circle to the 'old ways' just with modern tech. To me, htmx just makes webdev even more smoother.
I have the same question. It seems like a decent amount of posters here don't require (non-standard) interactivity. Plain HTML+CSS (perhaps via static site generators) would work.
It made me think about the Javascript present on my blog. The site works fine without JS (syntax high-lighting is pre-baked server-side).
There is some optional JS enhancement:
- MathJax is used for turning LaTeX expressions into nice graphics on the client-side. A search reveals this could be done on the server-side, but I'd need to deal with the node.js ecosystem.
- PJAX is enabled [1]. This is completely optional, but it noticeably made page navigation faster (feel instant), especially when navigating between pages already visited (forwards/backwards).
UPDATE: Reading https://triptychproject.org/, it seems like what PJAX does is item #3: "Partial page replacement"
Likewise, I started using HTMX with AWS Step Functions as the backend and it’s been difficult but also a joy. Sfn these days makes for a weird and wild text templating engine. I’ve been thinking about working on DSL overlay to smooth the bumps a bit.
That is not a use cases I would've expected Step Functions to handle; I'm intrigued. You're using express ones, I assume, but how are you wiring them up and why?
Right. People look at me funny for drinking my tea from a 500 ml thermal mug, courtesy of USS Defiant replicators, and it's not because of the Starfleet delta on it (people don't even recognize it, philistines).
1.25 liters is way beyond even my own addiction to lightweight liquid stimulants.
This implies it's all dropshipped print-on-demand, of course. Which is fine if you're just considering it a donation incentive rather than a worthwhile product in its own right.
In 2026, everything is server side. Serve your DOM updates encoded in JSON if you want. Personally, I find serving them in HTML to be less of a hassle.
HTMX's whole vibe is amazing. It's good tech, kept simple, useful in gobs of situations, but doesn't take itself too seriously. I've used it in professional and side projects since intercooler.js, and still love it. Here's a crazy unicorn-laser-eyes mug[0] that evokes the vibes of NROL-39[1]. I adore it.
The nrol 39 mission patch is one of my favorites. You should find the authorizing docs for that patch and read the hand written notes. They're hilarious.
I personally find react overly engineered for my projects - vuejs (+quasar on top) is just great. Granted a little boring perhaps, but it just works, behaves as you'd expect, and doing anything just isn't that difficult.
react based shit lost the plot so hard. i've used it quite a bit, with other beefy but impressive js libs like aggrid and stuff. i'm just tired of client-browser overwork in general that feels like such a mess. having so much of a webapps logic live in the front end feels completely preposterous to me these days. we've only ever needed front end to just.. be the front end. look nice, provide the interface, give people things to click. i very enjoy having all of the behavior determined and defined from the back next to all the code that brings in the data. feels so much more like writing good software.
with that im very enjoying the challenge of scaling ssr stuff like this. i am very tempted to throw months of my life away building out a full fledged framework that means no npm / node toolchains, an easier to customize component model thats more performant and doesn't feel like... abstractions of abstractions, compile time tree shakedowns. for all of it. streamlit showed me the beauty of a declarative api that kinda went and did the rest but it missed a ton of marks with its top to bottom runs and it's just awkward.. a little too opinionated, terrible performance, perhaps the dumbest state management ive ever seen in my life... nicegui improved on that, but python just doesn't fit the bill for what i want to do. something that's go and its fully reactive and gives you full control. i genuinely think the hardest part of doing this is designing a framework api that is approachable and easily-rememberable. golang actually makes this hard, python wins with kwargs and stuff. i also suppose i could just start using wasm
i think where this might all be headed.. it's a touchy subject if im being honest. our guy at work is an amazing person super candid and honest. he says it kinda hurts seeing the front end stack he's been in pretty much his entire career start to lose developer interest. we've talked in depth about how the entire history of things like react came to be out of necessity, a product of its time with all the historic constraints that used to exist.. it led to educational curriculums, bootcamps and full blown careers.. but it's really hard to get behind what feels like an overly complex workaround that spans well over a decade at this point. people have invested a lot in their frontend-frameworks and toolchains and workflows and other pieces of knowledge and understandably are ready to defend it the entire existence of "make the client browser do a lot of work work" model. but hey, I've used both heavily and for what it's worth I think server-side and a general programming language are really the path forward here and it feels like something that corrects one of computing histories biggest weird sidequests. i genuinely think everyone will have a deeper and better understanding of computing in general approaching from this angle, and i think ssr is a very valuable path to explore that can really open the doors to understanding what makes good software as you're forced to contend with the most important design pattern: if you're going to make the server do most of the work, what is needed to do it well & scale to many clients. it naturally leads you into some really exciting possibilities. i personally love where this is headed because it completely nerfs the need for such abominations such as graphql & it's supporting infra. i can just rawdog sql, the most goated query language of all time.
highly performant data grids imo are the gold standard of components. i'm okay with a blend of client and server side work to make this a reality, aggrid is a good example of a very sick front end lib that does this. but i look forward to seeing if anyone's going to do something new here that is performant as hell and served up from the backend, some kind of tanstack demonchild or satanic wasm data grid 9000
I was at Big Sky Dev Con when they unveiled the GameBoy game. I kid you not my jaw dropped. I thought it was some sort of like emulator gimmick until they said "everyone can take a physical cartridge home!"
One of the most delightful little swag stunts I've ever seen, and emblematic of the HTMX crew just how much they care about craft and delight in everything they do.
I love HTMX and use it in a few projects, but its amusing how whats old is new again. .NET Framework / Web Forms had update panels to do partial rendering of web pages back in 2005. Outside of .NET developers it got a lot of hate. But to a certain extent HTMX is a super well refined and more capable version of update panels and more.
And even that was even taking on the solution from c#'s daddy : Delphi IntraWeb suite, all the way back in Delphi 7 and after.
This whole concept died because of styling and that era of everyone having their pixel perfect psd turned into a html table or a flash applet and you couldn't reconcile both, but sometime out there you can still find an old IntraWeb business app and you realize they had the components, events and everything figured out long before it became cool again.
I always wish for some RAD tool to show up for modern web stack again, but I guess it moves too fast to be worth it, and nowadays front and backend are properly separated disciplines.
Coming from asp.net originally as well, my mental model of HTMX is “UpdatePanel that always works”. Asp.net AJAX lib was an interesting take at the time but my gosh was it hella complicated once you ventured past UpdatePanel.
Even though it’s basically dead tech I can’t bear to throw out my Apress book about it. :)
After developing react, angular, Vue frontends for a decade, going back to good old plain server side rendered ruby, elixir, hell even php just feels right.
Especially nowadays where AI changes how you interact with ugly languages like php, but benefit from their deep ecosystems, speed and super fast "build" times.
In fact, despite me being unable to look at php syntax much without vomiting, and finding languages without proper static types nauseating..I'm just more productive in those than in spa slop land.
The web and browser technologies has also moved a lot. The "client side rendering so users don't see a refresh and have an app like experience" is basically a 2010 thing.
I just like being able to pick up old projects that i avoided for ages, and being able to pull in HTMX and make it a bit more modern without rewriting in react/vue etc. And it feels like a modern app, not a 90s app.
HTMX is awesome. I've replaced several OSS web apps on my home server with HTMX + Go + PostgreSQL replacements. The results are lightweight, responsive, work great on desktop and mobile alike, all with the absolute minimum complexity required. The codebases are easy to understand and modify, and so far I'm going months between updates (mostly just minor bugfixes for my applications). I fully expec my mature apps will go years if not decades between required upgrades.
Are any of these open source? I've gone down the go/htmx/pg path lightly a few times and I haven't loved the feel of it, but maybe I'm doing it wrong. I think just server side templating just starts feeling icky in go so maybe I'm just missing a good pattern or library.
- Standard library http package for the API server implementation
- Standard library template/html package for generating the dynamic parts of the webpage content
- Static web content is embedded within the Go binary (https://pkg.go.dev/embed) and served through server routes
- api served from /api route, htmx webpage served from /
- no ORM, mostly using standard library database/sql package for DB transactions, maybe reaching for a query builder library for more complex queries like complex search functionality
- Local S3 compatible object store for dynamic binary data like user-uploaded images and video. Local filesystem can be fine for small scale stuff.
For my home server I have authn/authz happening at the OS/infra layer, but if you need multitenancy you can pretty easily integrate an OAuth/OpenID authn/authz middleware for login with Google or whatever.
I'm replacing existing third-party applications which have complex JavaScript frameworks with my "in house" apps using HTMX + mostly just HTML+CSS for most pages and functionality. i.e. I'm not introducing a layer, I'm replacing one.
Why not just use html without HTMX you ask? With HTMX I don't have to reload the entire page to navigate, which is especially helpful for making the app responsive even on low bandwidth connections like a bad cell signal.
That's great but I believe it's still over-engineered. Unless it's a web site that can tolerate no downtime at all during schema updates, SQLite in WAL2 mode is more than enough. Moreover, in Postgres version upgrades can't be done without significant downtime (or setting up replication and performing a complex dance), so even that isn't so cut and dry.
For some of the simpler sites sqlite would have been fine, but I do need Postgres anyway for some other stuff on my server so the overall burden of standardizing on Postgres only is less than having to do tuning for two different databases. In particular sqlite has worse defaults due to backwards compatibility, so you have to do a lot of upfront config for every table and DB.
Postgres version upgrades are basically painless, at my workplace our upgrades complete in so little time our users don't notice, and we have more data than probably 99.9999% of companies out there (mature company in aerospace industry).
I personally find Postgres WAY easier than SQLite simply because of the deployment story. I do a lot of hotfixes and dangerous stuff on personal projects, and having two databases complicates that tremendously. I like being able to run hot code on prod.
For the record, this is not the same reason I like postgres for actual production code
> Unless it's a web site that can tolerate no downtime at all during schema updates, SQLite in WAL2 mode is more than enough.
I do think that people really underestimate how quickly a system starts being "please, no downtime" (or its weaker cousin, "please, don't make your ops people do rollouts at 1AM").
Like obviously it's not the end of the world but the default assumption of "the system is up" makes a loooooot of things downstream of that easier.
Having to do operational bug triage on systems that routinely have blips in availability is unfun.
What I don't like about Htmx is, that it is still a JS framework, without good automatic fallbacks for a noscript situation. This leads to web devs thinking it would be great to do all the things in Htmx, even if all they have is a static page with static content.
Just recently I looked at hosting an old school forum. I don't want to load all the PHP and MySQL baggage on my server or even run it in docker, so I looked for Python solutions. Found PunkwebBB. Was happy for a short time with it, until I tested it more in depth with no scripts. Unfortunately, while it has some good fallbacks in some places, it doesn't have them everywhere and some buttons just don't do anything without JS. It also uses Htmx. Completely unnecessary JS, considering the function of the buttons.
I considered forking it. But the amount of work to remove the needless JS, and repair it ...
So now I am building my own forum completely without JS, and with Python Django doing a lot of heavy lifting.
> So now I am building my own forum completely without JS, and with Python Django doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Later this year I will be releasing Misago 0.40, which is a near complete rewrite from React.js to HTMX, with rest of features to follow in 2027. And yes, noscripy support is part of it.
It's too bad Htmx isn't just the native behavior of HTML, implemented in a cross-platform standard, that does not need to rely on Javascript in user space code. It could just be part of the browser. It should have been part of the browser.
It's awesome, I'm not criticizing Htmx at all to be clear, I am criticizing our seemingly inability to advance the core web technology of HTML in browsers to include this kind of tech natively.
If somebody from the WhatWG, e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Opera, and Mozilla, etc. wants to embrace and support the creators of Htmx and wrap this into the browser natively, I will proudly retract my comment.
Indeed. And the amusing/disappointing/frustrating thing is: my next.js site works if you turn off JS. Links are server-rendered as links, HTML is server-rendered as HTML. If you visit one of the tools that run on the client then they won't work, but the pages that could be static content? They're static content.
Or at least they were, until I started using cache components the other week, and I'd not noticed they'd regressed. That's frustrating. Give me a few minutes...
I have learned that whenever anything is "X if Y" it means it is really weak at X and "if Y" is just a workaround. This has saved me a lot of grief in life by identifying my personal emotional attachment to things.
I get the point but I do feel like Htmx's whole design is a big automatic fallback... If some browsers will never be able to understand the hx-get/post/etc attribs, you can just design the initial html you send over around that.
while what you're saying is true in theory, you still have to make sure that e.g. your form responses do the right thing. You might think "just return the full page!" but it's extra work that for many people is busywork, and makes it harder to reuse things ("my comment post endpoint returns the rendered comment" becomes "my comment post endpoint needs to know what page the comment is in to return the fully rendered page")
In practice I think it's very easy to make your htmx application JS-requiring.
Turbo comes from a progressive-enhancement philosophy: start with proper HTML and add richer behaviour on top. HTMX is a JavaScript library in much the same sense that React is. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it makes this anti-pattern easier to fall into.
Honestly, “the site should work without JavaScript” is no longer the strongest argument. Server-rendered, semantic HTML matters more for accessibility, SEO, and increasingly for LLMs and other automated tools.
Of course, you can write excellent HTML with HTMX. It just requires more discipline—or enough experience to recognize when you are quietly building a JavaScript application in HTML attributes.
Thank you to the HTMX-folks for keeping software fun! I've been a happy HTMX user and Grug essay forwarder since it first made the rounds here on HN. This was an instant purchase :)
hello all, we are releasing htmx 4.0 on the Game Boy and Gameboy Color (thank you rcy for submitting)
it is a real, honest-to-goodness mario-bros inspired GameBoy game with four levels over three biomes ending in a slop factory where you battle final boss warren buffering (an online character I beef with, we are friends)
if you beat him it unlocks the source code for htmx 4.0
game was written by Stephen Mitchell (aka scum) by hand, using GBStudio w/heavy customizations, hoping to get an essay by him up soon talking about the creation of the game
Oh hey, I made GB Studio, really cool to see it being used for this :) I've got some nice features in progress for the next version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8UKwV1gJAI
Did you use the built in GB studio sound engine? If so that's my code :) Always enjoyable when it pops up in places like this. Looks like a fun project.
Is it a real physical cartridge? How do you get the source code off the cartridge at the end? Or does it give you a passcode to a git repo or…like an NFT with access to the source?
I made the switch to HTMX recently After 12+ years of building web apps with Javascript and its been nice. I always hated the build complexity of modern Javascript, so much tooling, dependencies and packages to get basic functionality.
I’m amazed at how cheap this is. How is this possible for what I’m assuming is a relatively low-volume physical product? I don’t suppose it’s produced on-demand, but also Carson Gross probably doesn’t have 1000 of these boxes at his home, or I would have seen the pics on twitter.
In the pre agentic coding era, I was hyped about HTMX for providing a classic way of web development over React. But after not writing code for several months, all work done by claude code / codex, I find myself not caring whether the framework is HTMX or React anymore. I mean, why do you bother if you don't write the code yourself. And I'm even starting to feel React's advantages: good ecosystem, rich UI kits, reusable components… these are all where HTMX falls short. I'm surprised to see most people in this thread didn't mention any of these.
I can understand that feeling, but remember that just because you have been handed a new powertool you mustn't always use it. Life is not about optimizing everything. It makes redundant work faster, where you fully understand from the outset how to write something, but this just frees you up to learn and explore new things, and work on stuff just for the fun of it, like this.
Agreed that life is not about optimizing everything. I do enjoy writing code by hand when the framework or language is delightful to work with， it's just that HTMX isn't that choice for me. The h-attributes model doesn't fit the way I think. Also, my original point was more that once agents write most of the code, "delightful to hand-write" stops being the main criteria for picking a framework.
I don't see a relation in this. You can both use LLMs and care about your codebase design. Frameworks and libraries are still relevant, and each one has its tradeoffs.
While I am not particularly a fan of HTMX, I do absolutely adore how Carson and the team always have such a great sense of humor with the project.
I used HTMX in a few projects, and the library worked well enough for what I needed, but I found it to be a bit too limiting compared to accomplishing the same task in Vanilla JS (my go-to).
Love to see new stuff on ancient platforms. Surprised I couldn't find a post about Micro Mages on HN, only comments. https://youtu.be/ZWQ0591PAxM
Spoiler, when the time will come you'll never see something like this on the play station 4.
While I prefer to stay with an approach of using web components for my current work, HTMX seems like a good option to consider for future work.
I think the design of HTMX acts as a complexity limiter by encouraging less JS. One can make the argument that manually writing JS instead of HTMX would be easier and more maintainable. However, I've found that JS code often trends towards becoming increasingly complex over time.
Also, I'm glad to see that htmx can be installed without npm. I think the ability to install npm packages can incentivize too many dependencies.
- It's way too long and not catchy. What it refers to is a convoluted long thing too.
- This is the killer: it's not so mainstream that everybody knows it. People kind of took "REST" and left the rest. Even REST isn't usually real REST in practice. It just means json api nowadays.
I didn’t do the art, but I did do the graphic design/layout of the box. I can assure you there was no AI used on the box. (Well, except for the CRT effect on the screenshots. ChatGPT helped out there.) I did the work in PhotoPea using the artist’s original work as a base.
I've been using htmx for three years now, and it's completely unlocked new ways of building software for the web, especially if you use a server-side templating language.
But more importantly (as this "Game Boy" option reveals), the head honcho is really responsive with the items in the store. I had purchased a coffee mug a few years back and complained on Twitter that they need to sell larger mugs instead of only offering little tiny baby mugs that only hold ~8 ounces of liquid. The next day, he added giant 48-ounce monsters to the store and I've been drinking out of that mug every day since.
It's been massive for me as well. I would say my web developmemt is best described as dabbling in web development, and I mostly do so for websites that cater to academic interests and conference / society managment and organising. So, relativly niche.
However, I think HTMX is a beauty. Fast, simple, and doesnt come with all the bloat and BS a JS heavy / JS first deployment comes with. I can quikckly build fast and responsive sites that cost visitors very little to use/interact with.
websites have less compatability issues now, load extremely fast (google web speed score from 60-80 to flat 100), and have fewer points of failure. Debugging is a breeze. Websites are no less pretty or useful for it. In fact, they look better now because time otherwise wasted on Js BS is now free to use to tinker with / improve aesthetic, or add new features.
I'm in love with HTMX. It feels like what the web should have always been. There's absolutly zero reason a random website, without my knowledge or consent, should be running extremely heavy compute and analytics on my own device. That should never have been possible/permissible in the first place.
HTMX is just as JS compute heavy. It's not magic.
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> I've been using htmx for three years now, and it's completely unlocked new ways of building software for the web, especially if you use a server-side templating language.
Likewise. 3 or 4 years ago, I ripped out two-thirds of all the JS in my B2B SaaS by using htmx with server-side templating. So much simpler.
The ethos of allowing a return to a simpler way of building a web app resonates with me.
This should be the way. For some reason, over time, it became harder and harder to build web apps. Tech should be about making things easier though. I don't know where we went wrong.
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> The next day, he added giant 48-ounce monsters to the store and I've been drinking out of that mug every day since.
This was my trick for cutting back to two cups of coffee a day.
> it's completely unlocked new ways of building software for the web, especially if you use a server-side templating language.
Could you please expand on this point. As a “greybeard” web dev from the 2000’s era, I’d like to understand if your “unlocking” is my “that’s how it originally worked, get of my lawn”?
Yes - how you likely built websites in 2000's era (possibly with Classic ASP or PHP4 .. maybe Perl?) is the sort of websites we are addressing with HTMX.
It's bringing us back to that sort of web development but with modern tools and technology.
For the server side, we can use modern languages with better templating for html.
For the client, with htmx, you can do a lot of javascript such as ajax calls (load, trigger, etc) without writing javascript. With htmx you specify what you want to do inside html attributes.
So my actual javascript code ends up minimal.
I have been doing website dev since 2008. I've worked with PHP, C# (WebForms, MVC), a bit of python... not to mention maintaining an old website in Classic ASP.
2008-2010 I used C# WebForms. I didn't like it, but we still kept it simple, returning data from server side to html.
2010 I started to enjoy jQuery and saw potential returning data. Opened the door to provide more options for webdev.
Around 2014, I've started disagreeing with "modern website development" learning knockoutjs, requirejs, to eventually angularjs, npm's, etc. Sure, I learned and pushed forward but websites seemed to become more a chore and bloat overtime. Personally, I've not really invested in React.
I was starting to go round full circle to the 'old ways' just with modern tech. To me, htmx just makes webdev even more smoother.
I have the same question. It seems like a decent amount of posters here don't require (non-standard) interactivity. Plain HTML+CSS (perhaps via static site generators) would work.
It made me think about the Javascript present on my blog. The site works fine without JS (syntax high-lighting is pre-baked server-side).
There is some optional JS enhancement:
UPDATE: Reading https://triptychproject.org/, it seems like what PJAX does is item #3: "Partial page replacement"
[1]: The library is at https://www.aktau.be/js/pjax-standalone.js. It is invoked at the end of <body>:
Exactly, I just released another project made with htmx and it's almost like you can't beat that velocity.
Please I am all ears.
I have right now a landing page and a NiceGUI dashboard with websockets (but only need SSE, though I need charts).
I am all the time looking at htmx and used to "desktop-like" workflows for UI authoring.
So I went with NiceGUI. But I wonder if or what tasks I could sinolify. My sites are low/middle-traffic.
I do not need any API backend at all, just final user presentation.
Likewise, I started using HTMX with AWS Step Functions as the backend and it’s been difficult but also a joy. Sfn these days makes for a weird and wild text templating engine. I’ve been thinking about working on DSL overlay to smooth the bumps a bit.
That is not a use cases I would've expected Step Functions to handle; I'm intrigued. You're using express ones, I assume, but how are you wiring them up and why?
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Sorry, but at that size (1.25 liters) for my European brain, it's not a mug anymore, it's a barrel.
Right. People look at me funny for drinking my tea from a 500 ml thermal mug, courtesy of USS Defiant replicators, and it's not because of the Starfleet delta on it (people don't even recognize it, philistines).
1.25 liters is way beyond even my own addiction to lightweight liquid stimulants.
I think the legal term is a "heart attack".
It's more than double the size of a Sports Direct mug, which is about the largest cup of tea a Briton would consider
Tell me about it. I made a joke about the store selling 'Complexity Bad' onesies, and he started selling them later that day.
https://x.com/scumitchell/status/1886825775560528069?s=20
This implies it's all dropshipped print-on-demand, of course. Which is fine if you're just considering it a donation incentive rather than a worthwhile product in its own right.
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That's amazing!
So you drink weak coffee and insist on server-side rendering in 2026?
In 2026, everything is server side. Serve your DOM updates encoded in JSON if you want. Personally, I find serving them in HTML to be less of a hassle.
The server SHOULD do the rendering. It's a SERVER, not a give-me-a-bunch-of-bloated-junk-and-make-me-do-it-myself-er.
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HTMX's whole vibe is amazing. It's good tech, kept simple, useful in gobs of situations, but doesn't take itself too seriously. I've used it in professional and side projects since intercooler.js, and still love it. Here's a crazy unicorn-laser-eyes mug[0] that evokes the vibes of NROL-39[1]. I adore it.
[0]: https://swag.htmx.org/collections/octohorse
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-247
The nrol 39 mission patch is one of my favorites. You should find the authorizing docs for that patch and read the hand written notes. They're hilarious.
I was against it for ages but having have claude use it in a simple project and being frankly sick/bored of React, it seems nice.
I personally find react overly engineered for my projects - vuejs (+quasar on top) is just great. Granted a little boring perhaps, but it just works, behaves as you'd expect, and doing anything just isn't that difficult.
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Any comments on how you’re holding it? Just “Hey Claude use htmx”?
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react based shit lost the plot so hard. i've used it quite a bit, with other beefy but impressive js libs like aggrid and stuff. i'm just tired of client-browser overwork in general that feels like such a mess. having so much of a webapps logic live in the front end feels completely preposterous to me these days. we've only ever needed front end to just.. be the front end. look nice, provide the interface, give people things to click. i very enjoy having all of the behavior determined and defined from the back next to all the code that brings in the data. feels so much more like writing good software.
with that im very enjoying the challenge of scaling ssr stuff like this. i am very tempted to throw months of my life away building out a full fledged framework that means no npm / node toolchains, an easier to customize component model thats more performant and doesn't feel like... abstractions of abstractions, compile time tree shakedowns. for all of it. streamlit showed me the beauty of a declarative api that kinda went and did the rest but it missed a ton of marks with its top to bottom runs and it's just awkward.. a little too opinionated, terrible performance, perhaps the dumbest state management ive ever seen in my life... nicegui improved on that, but python just doesn't fit the bill for what i want to do. something that's go and its fully reactive and gives you full control. i genuinely think the hardest part of doing this is designing a framework api that is approachable and easily-rememberable. golang actually makes this hard, python wins with kwargs and stuff. i also suppose i could just start using wasm
i think where this might all be headed.. it's a touchy subject if im being honest. our guy at work is an amazing person super candid and honest. he says it kinda hurts seeing the front end stack he's been in pretty much his entire career start to lose developer interest. we've talked in depth about how the entire history of things like react came to be out of necessity, a product of its time with all the historic constraints that used to exist.. it led to educational curriculums, bootcamps and full blown careers.. but it's really hard to get behind what feels like an overly complex workaround that spans well over a decade at this point. people have invested a lot in their frontend-frameworks and toolchains and workflows and other pieces of knowledge and understandably are ready to defend it the entire existence of "make the client browser do a lot of work work" model. but hey, I've used both heavily and for what it's worth I think server-side and a general programming language are really the path forward here and it feels like something that corrects one of computing histories biggest weird sidequests. i genuinely think everyone will have a deeper and better understanding of computing in general approaching from this angle, and i think ssr is a very valuable path to explore that can really open the doors to understanding what makes good software as you're forced to contend with the most important design pattern: if you're going to make the server do most of the work, what is needed to do it well & scale to many clients. it naturally leads you into some really exciting possibilities. i personally love where this is headed because it completely nerfs the need for such abominations such as graphql & it's supporting infra. i can just rawdog sql, the most goated query language of all time.
highly performant data grids imo are the gold standard of components. i'm okay with a blend of client and server side work to make this a reality, aggrid is a good example of a very sick front end lib that does this. but i look forward to seeing if anyone's going to do something new here that is performant as hell and served up from the backend, some kind of tanstack demonchild or satanic wasm data grid 9000
I was at Big Sky Dev Con when they unveiled the GameBoy game. I kid you not my jaw dropped. I thought it was some sort of like emulator gimmick until they said "everyone can take a physical cartridge home!"
One of the most delightful little swag stunts I've ever seen, and emblematic of the HTMX crew just how much they care about craft and delight in everything they do.
I love HTMX and use it in a few projects, but its amusing how whats old is new again. .NET Framework / Web Forms had update panels to do partial rendering of web pages back in 2005. Outside of .NET developers it got a lot of hate. But to a certain extent HTMX is a super well refined and more capable version of update panels and more.
And even that was even taking on the solution from c#'s daddy : Delphi IntraWeb suite, all the way back in Delphi 7 and after.
This whole concept died because of styling and that era of everyone having their pixel perfect psd turned into a html table or a flash applet and you couldn't reconcile both, but sometime out there you can still find an old IntraWeb business app and you realize they had the components, events and everything figured out long before it became cool again.
I always wish for some RAD tool to show up for modern web stack again, but I guess it moves too fast to be worth it, and nowadays front and backend are properly separated disciplines.
Coming from asp.net originally as well, my mental model of HTMX is “UpdatePanel that always works”. Asp.net AJAX lib was an interesting take at the time but my gosh was it hella complicated once you ventured past UpdatePanel.
Even though it’s basically dead tech I can’t bear to throw out my Apress book about it. :)
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/foundations-of-aspnet-ajax-...
In a way HTMX is similar to how we used to write websites on LAMP stacks, except with higher quality of life.
After developing react, angular, Vue frontends for a decade, going back to good old plain server side rendered ruby, elixir, hell even php just feels right.
Especially nowadays where AI changes how you interact with ugly languages like php, but benefit from their deep ecosystems, speed and super fast "build" times.
In fact, despite me being unable to look at php syntax much without vomiting, and finding languages without proper static types nauseating..I'm just more productive in those than in spa slop land.
The web and browser technologies has also moved a lot. The "client side rendering so users don't see a refresh and have an app like experience" is basically a 2010 thing.
I just like being able to pick up old projects that i avoided for ages, and being able to pull in HTMX and make it a bit more modern without rewriting in react/vue etc. And it feels like a modern app, not a 90s app.
HTMX is awesome. I've replaced several OSS web apps on my home server with HTMX + Go + PostgreSQL replacements. The results are lightweight, responsive, work great on desktop and mobile alike, all with the absolute minimum complexity required. The codebases are easy to understand and modify, and so far I'm going months between updates (mostly just minor bugfixes for my applications). I fully expec my mature apps will go years if not decades between required upgrades.
Are any of these open source? I've gone down the go/htmx/pg path lightly a few times and I haven't loved the feel of it, but maybe I'm doing it wrong. I think just server side templating just starts feeling icky in go so maybe I'm just missing a good pattern or library.
I don't want to ID my account but they basically look like:
- OpenAPI API spec and using https://github.com/oapi-codegen/oapi-codegen/ to generate the types, server interface, and client library
- Standard library http package for the API server implementation
- Standard library template/html package for generating the dynamic parts of the webpage content
- Static web content is embedded within the Go binary (https://pkg.go.dev/embed) and served through server routes
- api served from /api route, htmx webpage served from /
- no ORM, mostly using standard library database/sql package for DB transactions, maybe reaching for a query builder library for more complex queries like complex search functionality
- Local S3 compatible object store for dynamic binary data like user-uploaded images and video. Local filesystem can be fine for small scale stuff.
For my home server I have authn/authz happening at the OS/infra layer, but if you need multitenancy you can pretty easily integrate an OAuth/OpenID authn/authz middleware for login with Google or whatever.
I just started experimenting with GSX and GSXUI
https://github.com/gsxhq/gsxui
https://github.com/jackielii/structpages is what I might call a framework that GSX sits nicely in.
Also one ai haven't tried: Templ.
https://github.com/a-h/templ
I wrote specifically about this, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48915935
How does introducing a third layer reduce complexity?
I'm replacing existing third-party applications which have complex JavaScript frameworks with my "in house" apps using HTMX + mostly just HTML+CSS for most pages and functionality. i.e. I'm not introducing a layer, I'm replacing one.
Why not just use html without HTMX you ask? With HTMX I don't have to reload the entire page to navigate, which is especially helpful for making the app responsive even on low bandwidth connections like a bad cell signal.
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<please don't take this too seriously>
That's great but I believe it's still over-engineered. Unless it's a web site that can tolerate no downtime at all during schema updates, SQLite in WAL2 mode is more than enough. Moreover, in Postgres version upgrades can't be done without significant downtime (or setting up replication and performing a complex dance), so even that isn't so cut and dry.
</ ... >
For some of the simpler sites sqlite would have been fine, but I do need Postgres anyway for some other stuff on my server so the overall burden of standardizing on Postgres only is less than having to do tuning for two different databases. In particular sqlite has worse defaults due to backwards compatibility, so you have to do a lot of upfront config for every table and DB.
Postgres version upgrades are basically painless, at my workplace our upgrades complete in so little time our users don't notice, and we have more data than probably 99.9999% of companies out there (mature company in aerospace industry).
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Every time I start with sqlite I outgrow it in some way, so I start with postgres now.
From an engineering perspective, sqlite and PostgreSQL are equivalent.
The difference is only in the deployment/maintenance.
And considering the context he stated, zero downtime really doesn't seem like something he's worrying about.
(Me not taking this seriously)
I personally find Postgres WAY easier than SQLite simply because of the deployment story. I do a lot of hotfixes and dangerous stuff on personal projects, and having two databases complicates that tremendously. I like being able to run hot code on prod.
For the record, this is not the same reason I like postgres for actual production code
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> Unless it's a web site that can tolerate no downtime at all during schema updates, SQLite in WAL2 mode is more than enough.
I do think that people really underestimate how quickly a system starts being "please, no downtime" (or its weaker cousin, "please, don't make your ops people do rollouts at 1AM").
Like obviously it's not the end of the world but the default assumption of "the system is up" makes a loooooot of things downstream of that easier.
Having to do operational bug triage on systems that routinely have blips in availability is unfun.
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What I don't like about Htmx is, that it is still a JS framework, without good automatic fallbacks for a noscript situation. This leads to web devs thinking it would be great to do all the things in Htmx, even if all they have is a static page with static content.
Just recently I looked at hosting an old school forum. I don't want to load all the PHP and MySQL baggage on my server or even run it in docker, so I looked for Python solutions. Found PunkwebBB. Was happy for a short time with it, until I tested it more in depth with no scripts. Unfortunately, while it has some good fallbacks in some places, it doesn't have them everywhere and some buttons just don't do anything without JS. It also uses Htmx. Completely unnecessary JS, considering the function of the buttons.
I considered forking it. But the amount of work to remove the needless JS, and repair it ...
So now I am building my own forum completely without JS, and with Python Django doing a lot of heavy lifting.
> So now I am building my own forum completely without JS, and with Python Django doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Later this year I will be releasing Misago 0.40, which is a near complete rewrite from React.js to HTMX, with rest of features to follow in 2027. And yes, noscripy support is part of it.
https://misago-project.org/t/removing-reactjs-from-the-codeb...
It's too bad Htmx isn't just the native behavior of HTML, implemented in a cross-platform standard, that does not need to rely on Javascript in user space code. It could just be part of the browser. It should have been part of the browser.
It's awesome, I'm not criticizing Htmx at all to be clear, I am criticizing our seemingly inability to advance the core web technology of HTML in browsers to include this kind of tech natively.
If somebody from the WhatWG, e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Opera, and Mozilla, etc. wants to embrace and support the creators of Htmx and wrap this into the browser natively, I will proudly retract my comment.
we are working on this minimum viable set of changes currently:
https://triptychproject.org/
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I recall that was the intent of HTMX? His dream being to steer HTML towards these kinds of primitives and HTMX becoming deprecated.
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Indeed. And the amusing/disappointing/frustrating thing is: my next.js site works if you turn off JS. Links are server-rendered as links, HTML is server-rendered as HTML. If you visit one of the tools that run on the client then they won't work, but the pages that could be static content? They're static content.
Or at least they were, until I started using cache components the other week, and I'd not noticed they'd regressed. That's frustrating. Give me a few minutes...
Htmx is actually quite good at graceful degradation IF you stick to hx-boost for most interactions. See https://dev.to/yawaramin/why-hx-boost-is-actually-the-most-i...
I have learned that whenever anything is "X if Y" it means it is really weak at X and "if Y" is just a workaround. This has saved me a lot of grief in life by identifying my personal emotional attachment to things.
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I get the point but I do feel like Htmx's whole design is a big automatic fallback... If some browsers will never be able to understand the hx-get/post/etc attribs, you can just design the initial html you send over around that.
while what you're saying is true in theory, you still have to make sure that e.g. your form responses do the right thing. You might think "just return the full page!" but it's extra work that for many people is busywork, and makes it harder to reuse things ("my comment post endpoint returns the rendered comment" becomes "my comment post endpoint needs to know what page the comment is in to return the fully rendered page")
In practice I think it's very easy to make your htmx application JS-requiring.
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This is exactly why I prefer Turbo ( https://turbo.hotwired.dev/ ).
Turbo comes from a progressive-enhancement philosophy: start with proper HTML and add richer behaviour on top. HTMX is a JavaScript library in much the same sense that React is. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it makes this anti-pattern easier to fall into.
Honestly, “the site should work without JavaScript” is no longer the strongest argument. Server-rendered, semantic HTML matters more for accessibility, SEO, and increasingly for LLMs and other automated tools.
Of course, you can write excellent HTML with HTMX. It just requires more discipline—or enough experience to recognize when you are quietly building a JavaScript application in HTML attributes.
Thank you to the HTMX-folks for keeping software fun! I've been a happy HTMX user and Grug essay forwarder since it first made the rounds here on HN. This was an instant purchase :)
Ooh, I didn't know the creator of htmx was also the author of the Grug Brained Developer! [0][1]
TIL. Thanks! Now all the Grug references in the shop make sense, as well as the wisdom and overall vibe of the htmx project :)
[0] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2336201/complexity-bad-an-...
[1] https://grugbrain.dev/
Is it true that the person who authored the "Grug-brained developer" essay also created HTMX?
yep
and this comment‽
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he wrote the Lulu book
Amazing... an HTMX thread without any haters interjecting or critics telling everyone why HTMX wont work.
Even React-aholics have to tip their hats to a Game Boy release.
Crazy how much things have shifted since a few years ago
hello all, we are releasing htmx 4.0 on the Game Boy and Gameboy Color (thank you rcy for submitting)
it is a real, honest-to-goodness mario-bros inspired GameBoy game with four levels over three biomes ending in a slop factory where you battle final boss warren buffering (an online character I beef with, we are friends)
if you beat him it unlocks the source code for htmx 4.0
game was written by Stephen Mitchell (aka scum) by hand, using GBStudio w/heavy customizations, hoping to get an essay by him up soon talking about the creation of the game
carts were produced w/the expertise of Jarason Banes who also did the cover design. Cover art is by Ash (https://www.fiverr.com/ae1996/) who also did the soft-cover art for https://hypermedia.systems
Hope you find it enjoyable if you get a copy and at least find it funny if you don't :)
Oh hey, I made GB Studio, really cool to see it being used for this :) I've got some nice features in progress for the next version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8UKwV1gJAI
Sweet - thanks for your work on GB Studio, Chris. The music, sprite and palette tools were invaluable during development.
Did you use the built in GB studio sound engine? If so that's my code :) Always enjoyable when it pops up in places like this. Looks like a fun project.
Yes, we did. It was a blast using that to make the sounds and music.
Got really good at using it by the end of the project. You can listen to the trailer music here. Let me know what you think.
https://www.youtube.com/live/9ubSJGyB21Q?si=sz-8pxPs6zxVYMfY...
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My hat's off to you for finding and shouting out an artist to complete the look!
Ordered... along with some other swag.
Love HTMX, can't wait for my https://brickboy.xyz/ to arrive so I can get to work!
Amazing, can’t wait to see the first unboxing / let’s play / review videos.
Is it a real physical cartridge? How do you get the source code off the cartridge at the end? Or does it give you a passcode to a git repo or…like an NFT with access to the source?
It's a real cartridge
There's a source code reader at the end of the game, tbd if there are transfer abilities, I haven't beat it yet
yep, you'd need to transcribe it
Wait but where do we get a gameboy?
modretro has new ones
https://modretro.com/products/chromatic-tetris-bundle
you can find cheaper ones on amazon/temu too
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This is too funny, how could I not?
How much did this cost to make/produce?
Whatever it cost, he also gave out free copies at BSDC, what an unbelievably cool and nice thing to do
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Wait - you guys got paid?
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I made the switch to HTMX recently After 12+ years of building web apps with Javascript and its been nice. I always hated the build complexity of modern Javascript, so much tooling, dependencies and packages to get basic functionality.
next release ships on a Tamagotchi and if you don't feed it, it deletes your DOM
How... how did you know?
I’m amazed at how cheap this is. How is this possible for what I’m assuming is a relatively low-volume physical product? I don’t suppose it’s produced on-demand, but also Carson Gross probably doesn’t have 1000 of these boxes at his home, or I would have seen the pics on twitter.
we are selling it pretty cheap we got 1000 made and gave 150 away to Big Sky Dev Conf attendees
Not trying to make money on it, it’s for the lols
Why not both?
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I love these guys sense of humor in having a HTMX Sucks line in their inventory with literal nice products, like the Christmas jumper...
It is drop shipping stuff.
A true statement for virtually any piece of merch you could buy from any company.
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In the pre agentic coding era, I was hyped about HTMX for providing a classic way of web development over React. But after not writing code for several months, all work done by claude code / codex, I find myself not caring whether the framework is HTMX or React anymore. I mean, why do you bother if you don't write the code yourself. And I'm even starting to feel React's advantages: good ecosystem, rich UI kits, reusable components… these are all where HTMX falls short. I'm surprised to see most people in this thread didn't mention any of these.
I can understand that feeling, but remember that just because you have been handed a new powertool you mustn't always use it. Life is not about optimizing everything. It makes redundant work faster, where you fully understand from the outset how to write something, but this just frees you up to learn and explore new things, and work on stuff just for the fun of it, like this.
Agreed that life is not about optimizing everything. I do enjoy writing code by hand when the framework or language is delightful to work with， it's just that HTMX isn't that choice for me. The h-attributes model doesn't fit the way I think. Also, my original point was more that once agents write most of the code, "delightful to hand-write" stops being the main criteria for picking a framework.
I don't see a relation in this. You can both use LLMs and care about your codebase design. Frameworks and libraries are still relevant, and each one has its tradeoffs.
Is there any substantial web app written htmx?
I find htmx ideal for things that should be static to begin with, and for things that are dynamic, I fail to see how it can handle synchronisation?
I believe Github is using similar technology and their notifications indicators and counter are almost always broken and out of sync.
I'm using htmx in the hkknx web app to control smart home accessories.
https://hkknx.hochgatterer.me/
And it doesn't load, guess what would load just fine? a React app hosted on a cdn.
I believe Hotwire for Ruby on Rails uses a lot of HTMX under the hood.
https://htmx.org/essays/paris-2024-olympics-htmx-network-aut...
Yeah, it is interesting that most people who promote htmx are not "insiders" (for the lack of a better word that isn't loaded like "expert").
Has or will the ROM be made available for online purchase? Totally understand if it'll be kept cartridge only, the novelty is fantastic haha!
While I am not particularly a fan of HTMX, I do absolutely adore how Carson and the team always have such a great sense of humor with the project.
I used HTMX in a few projects, and the library worked well enough for what I needed, but I found it to be a bit too limiting compared to accomplishing the same task in Vanilla JS (my go-to).
Love to see new stuff on ancient platforms. Surprised I couldn't find a post about Micro Mages on HN, only comments. https://youtu.be/ZWQ0591PAxM Spoiler, when the time will come you'll never see something like this on the play station 4.
Exclusively? Htmx runs in a browser, as people in this thread are attesting with how they've been using it for years
The Game Boy contains source code of the upcoming HTMX 4.0
This is beautiful, the title alone gave me a good chuckle.
This might be my first new Gameboy Cart in like ever. So looking forward to this HTMX release.
htmx is so great. i feel like every week i discover some lovely way it helps things run more smoothly
this is the counter culture we all live for.
well done to the htmx team.
While I prefer to stay with an approach of using web components for my current work, HTMX seems like a good option to consider for future work.
I think the design of HTMX acts as a complexity limiter by encouraging less JS. One can make the argument that manually writing JS instead of HTMX would be easier and more maintainable. However, I've found that JS code often trends towards becoming increasingly complex over time.
Also, I'm glad to see that htmx can be installed without npm. I think the ability to install npm packages can incentivize too many dependencies.
As a side note, anyone is welcome to add 'CEO of HTMX' to their LinkedIn profile.
...I may have done this.
There is one thing I don't like about htmx. It's that they like to use the HATEOAS acronym. It's a bad acronym in every conceivable way.
They HATEOAS because they Hain'tOAS.
Why?
- Starts with HATE
- It's way too long and not catchy. What it refers to is a convoluted long thing too.
- This is the killer: it's not so mainstream that everybody knows it. People kind of took "REST" and left the rest. Even REST isn't usually real REST in practice. It just means json api nowadays.
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I didn’t do the art, but I did do the graphic design/layout of the box. I can assure you there was no AI used on the box. (Well, except for the CRT effect on the screenshots. ChatGPT helped out there.) I did the work in PhotoPea using the artist’s original work as a base.
The cover art is by ash on fiverr. He also did the cover of hypermedia systems:
https://hypermedia.systems
recursivedoubts already mentioned the Cover art is by Ash and included a link to his credentials and portfolio.
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