Comment by asdfsa32
6 hours ago
Great, now you can't offload your FE to a CDN.
But on serious note, htmx is basically a solution in the search of a problem. It is the new hype.
Or rather, a solution that overlooks 2 decades of learnings. Yes, for a small set of projects htmx is okay, but even then, where htmx is ideal, static is king, and once static is not good enough, htmx sooner or later starts to feel like the XAML and BPEL soap.
The fundamental problem is that it is pretending to be a declarative language while entirely imperative.
Sounds like you never worked on complex HTMX systems. They're easier to maintain, allow for easy caching of HTML fragments in a page. For higher traffic pages React just fails spectacularly.
How does React fail for high traffic pages? It is amazing that you would suggest I don't understand HTMX "systems" and then go make such assertion.
I have been writing frontends since early 2000. So I have seen it all, from activex being shinny to jquery, mootools, backbonejs, angular 1.0, php, Java Spring, Go. I looked into htmx and it is very much a second attempt at angular 1.0, which I did use for some good half decade as that was the best option at the time, but sooner or later, you get sick of stuffing "little codelets" inside attributes all over the place, which is exactly what htmx does.
If you want to understand what htmx is going to look like at scale, look at angular 1.0 projects.
Angular being basically the same HTMX is nonsense and you should know better.
Say you have a huge Google Ads budget burning up on those landing pages. Make one version with React and one with HTMX. Open Lighthouse and see performance difference. First page renders are much slower with React. Page load is slower and this makes a huge difference in mainland USA where people are still on 3G speeds on their budget phones.
"High traffic" might be the simplified view here and it took me a few page memos to explain it to my lead but the gist is that React is slower, takes longer to load and most of what it is used for is easily done with plain HTML and sprinkles of JS as needed. Unless you're streaming sound or video like you do on Facebook pages it's really not the right tool for the job in a majority of cases.
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As someone who wrote a lot of angular back in the day, and who writes a lot of htmx in the current day... That comparison makes absolutely no sense.
The only thing the 2 have in common is the use of HTML attributes for functionality. Completely different on every other axis that matters.
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Being a curmudgeon is not good engineering leadership. "Seeing everything" is just old people being wistful, not actually contributing or doing in the now. I deployed (via ftp) my first site before Netscape so I do understand where you're coming. There isn't at present a valid or detailed criticism of why X won't Y based on all of that supposed XP - so why mention it? Educate us - why will it fail? Is it because you never mastered CDN's or the exact opposite? It certainly doesn't lead any credibility the assertion that A will become Z because they look similar or embrace similar ethos.
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If you really think HTMX and Angular 1.0 are equivalent then…actually I don’t even know where to begin.
Why would react fail for higher traffic pages?
If it's a traditional React SPA, you can use a versioned bundle with immutable caching and each user only has to download your bundle when you release an update or they use a new browser. You will need to think about how you handle spikes in traffic when you do a release, but even then users won't all load your page immediately after you bump the version.
Most of the time (existing user using the same browser, no update) there will be precisely zero traffic to your servers to load the React app except for the initial HTML skeleton.
For an app using SSR it's more complicated and I'll admit I don't know how that works at very high load
I had landing pages using React on a 1.6M/m budget. The loading times on cell phones in mainland USA meant we had people cancelling the loading of pages. When we converted to straight up cached HTML we saw a huge increase in full page loads.
People weren't cancelling the page load and surfing back anymore. You cannot argue that React is extremely heavy and also adds a lot of time between first render. Test a normal HTMX page in Lighthouse and then convert it to React and you'll see how drastic things are.
People use React today out of habit rather than because it's the best tool for the job.
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For what it's worth, your last statement is why react always felt off to me.
This feels like an uninformed, generalized opinion from someone with zero experience on the topic. Have you even used HTMX or a similar approach?
Besides the memes, it is absolutely not hype-driven, but hypermedia driven. It asks the question: could HTML be even more powerful than it already is?
The creators of HTMX even want to standardize core ideas of HTMX into the official HTML specification: https://triptychproject.org/ Please read this and reply when you still think it's hype.
I have been writing frontends since early 2000. So I have seen it all, from activex being shinny to jquery, mootools, backbonejs, angular 1.0, php, Java Spring, Go.
Hypermedia is what to web apps what XML is to programming languages. We have tried HTMX as a concept many times over, there is nothing new here, and like everything declarative, sooner or later it will fall short and you're going to reach for escape hatches and what not.
And the features specified in that project is nice to have, in the same way that it is nice that we have Date Pickers or other advanced input features, but it is never going to replace React-like frameworks.
Again, the reason we have finally stabilised on JSX is because you can't really "Declare" away HTML or sophisticated data and event management, Google really really tried that with Angular 1.0, and we know it doesn't scale.
> Hypermedia is what to web apps what XML is to programming languages.
I have no idea what this means. The World Wide Web itself is quite literally hypermedia.
The fact that a lot of front-end frameworks appear hell bent on ignoring this fact doesn't make it any less true.
> Again, the reason we have finally stabilised on JSX is because you can't really "Declare" away HTML or sophisticated data and event management...
You may have stabilised on JSX, "we" have not. React is one way of building web applications. It's appropriate for a certain subset of highly interactive SPAs, and completely inappropriate for many other things.
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The creators of HTMX are combative, dismissive, and short-sighted. Keep them far away from any spec discussions.
> hot take > 70-day old account > relentless contrarianism
steer clear.