Naive question but how would styling be handled actually? If the server just returns plain html tags with content in it ... I mean, I don't quite get it
Instead of HTML, CSS, JS in that order maybe they got chucked right into a NextJS / Tailwind twitter clone course as their intro to web dev.
Say I have my css sheet included, now I still need to set the class and id attributes everywhere I need styling.
Are you telling me the client needs to parse the html result and add those manually? Seems absurd. Are you telling me a real Hypermedia API would return stuff like
<div class="...">data</div>
? That would seem equally absurd, why would the API concern itself with css classes lol.
That's what I don't get
Take an old school original rails app. No JS. Nothing. If something is gonna happen it is because you clicked a link or submitted a form.
In that app any page is generated by the server and must have any classes defined for css also rendered.
So the server is already needing to know about this and inject those classes.
With HTMX it is the same thing except you render partials sometimes and sometimes the whole page.
Beyond that I don’t think adding an id or class here and there is too bad. I’d avoid class heavy frameworks, as I believe you are alluding to.
<html> <body> <div>Account number: 12345</div> <div>Balance: $100.00 USD</div> <div>Links: <a href="/accounts/12345/deposits">deposits</a> <a href="/accounts/12345/withdrawals">withdrawals</a> <a href="/accounts/12345/transfers">transfers</a> <a href="/accounts/12345/close-requests">close-requests</a> </div> <body> </html>
What I don't get is who says I want to have all of that html displayed in this exact form anywhere I make a request for account info? Say I want to only display the Account balance - are you telling me client has to cut and parse the html response for that? How much html parsing is that gonna be all over a web page?
Also the example I gave below about setting the css classes and ids inside the returned html elements...
This is my slight “ugh” against it and why I prefer the idea of the frameworks that just get the entire page and do a differential swap because architecturally that is simpler. No need to create lots of weird little partials and wire them up.
There's probably some kind of balance between giving every partial it's own URL and allowing each partial to support a filtered response. You could write a little middleware for your http server to support the filtered response on every endpoint that returns HTML.
This would process the app response and filters/zoom to the part of the doc you want. The app could be agnostic and it reduces the amount of crap sent over the wire.
That's probably safer in some ways than filtering server side.
https://htmx.org/attributes/hx-select/
I think it would really benefit the project to have more documentation/examples of architectural patterns for how an app might use HTMX.
there is a page here with links to various repos people have put together: