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Comment by recursivedoubts | Hacker News Reader

I am working on two alternative tools for building web apps:

https://htmx.org - uses HTML attributes and HTML-over-the-wire for AJAX/Web Socket/SSE interactions

https://hyperscript.org - an experimental front end programming language derived from HyperTalk that is event-oriented and that removes the distinction between synchronous and asynchronous code.

Both tools are HTML-oriented and are designed to be embedded directly in your HTML, rather than along side it. I am trying to popularize the term "Locality of Behaviour" for this idea:

https://htmx.org/essays/locality-of-behaviour/

There are a few tools that are moving people this direction these days, notably AlpineJS and Tailwinds.

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I've played with HTMX (and previously intercooler.js). Just wanted to say - everything you touch is awesome. Thanks for your efforts.

I also like Alpine.js and Stimulus.js projects. They're trying to simplify the insanity of front-end development.

Go + HTMX is super powers. It peels away the piles and piles of framework layers and still gets you 90% there. For the 10%, just use React/Angular/Vue.

thank you very much, that's awesome to hear

"Locality of Behavior" is how everything started, when we used to embed PHP code into html. :)

yep

the idea wasn't wrong, but the level of expressivity wasn't there yet

trying to fix that

I'm really looking forward to Hyperscript growing more capabilities. I love that it's very natural-language-oriented. I'm really interested in frameworks like this that could make HTML website creation more accessible for regular people. Watching a friend try to build a website with SquareSpace I was thinking... for the amount of effort she put into learning SS's tools and quirks, she could almost have just learned HTML.

yep, the tool chain startup costs in front end development are very high unfortunately

I honestly think for the sorts of websites you make in SquareSpace, they shouldn't be. There's no reason that to develop a static website (even with some dynamic elements like a shopping cart) that you should need e.g. a build process to target modern browsers (i.e. consumers in Western economies).

But this is probably me being idealistic. It's why I like things like hyperscript... it feels like we might be _just_ on the cusp of what I'm saying being true.

I'm not sure what came first, but it's unfortunate that hyperscript.org clashes with hyperscript, the pure JavaScript notation to describe HTML.

hyperscript (`h()`) had its first commit 9 years ago and the syntax is common in other rendering libraries (e.g. mithril, ivi).

_hyperscript (this one) seems to have released 0.0.1 only last year.

Definitely very confusing on the naming front. It is at least possible to disambiguate searches with the underscore.

This is incredible. I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time. Love the site and documentation, please keep up the fantastic work. I am excited to play with this over the weekend and see what I can make!

htmx looks super intriguing.

Anyone have recommendations for server-side languages that make HTML templating fun? I’m leaning towards Elixir+Phoenix using sigils[1]

[1] https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix_html/Phoenix.HTML.html#sigil_E/2

HyperScript is so cool. I’m seriously going to look at this after I was stuck in a pit of addEventListeners yesterday.

:) it's pretty cool, but also pretty alpha

happy to help you get started if you want to jump on the discord

beautiful solutions, thank you for ur work

Is there similar solution for manipulating tables and json? I am not a front-end developer, so when i am preparing a poc, it always takes me so long to parse data in a table. Someone must have done the same thing as htmx for tables, or i hope ...

what kind of manipulations?

you can implement server side versions of most manipulations and then use htmx to trigger them and rerender the whole table, if that's acceptable from a UX standpoint

here is an example of active search that filters a table:

https://htmx.org/examples/active-search/

on the same note, I'm really enjoying basecamp/hey's hotwire stuff together with go templates.

will be checking out htmx as well, thank you for the links.

Just wanted to thank you for htmx!

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