# Why I use htmx

> Why I use htmx as the H in my AHA Stack: it lets any element trigger an HTTP request and ship HTML over the wire, so I write far less client-side JavaScript.

Author: Flavio Copes | Published: 2024-01-15 | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/why-i-use-htmx/

I introduced the notion of the “AHA Stack” - a set of tools I’ve been using with great satisfaction to create things on the Web.

A big, probably the most novel, thing in the AHA Stack is the `H` part: **htmx**.

htmx is a super interesting library.

Indie (not provided to you by a FAANG), simple, written in a single [JavaScript](https://flaviocopes.com/javascript/) file in ~3800 lines with no build step, htmx defines itself as an "extension of HTML".

It brings a few brilliant ideas.

In particular I can mention it makes it possible that:

- **any HTML element can initiate an HTTP request** (not just forms or links)
- **any event can trigger an HTTP request**
- **you can use all HTTP methods** (PUT, DELETE, PATCH) declaratively in addition to GET (forms and links) and POST (available only to forms in HTML)

Those 3 ideas alone are genius.

Plus, we have the biggest change in thinking compared to traditional JS frameworks: **you ship HTML over the wire**.

Using those ideas I can create interactions and experiences that would otherwise require me to write a ton of JavaScript, depend on a big pile of JavaScript dependencies and hundreds of [npm](https://flaviocopes.com/npm/) packages, to execute a ton of JavaScript on the client side.

It's a brilliant little library, with no dependencies, that you install through a script tag. It's backend-agnostic.

We use htmx to handle client-server HTTP communication once the page is loaded.

So for example the user clicks a link, and we load some data from the server, which we get back as HTML, and we add it to the page dynamically.

And we do this in a way that's declarative.

Not imperatively writing JavaScript to tell the page what to do, instead, we go up a level of abstraction, and declare what we want it to do.