Why I use htmx

I recently introduced this 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 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 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.