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Comment by paczki | Hacker News Reader

As someone relatively new (few months in) to full-stack development, what can HTMX offer me? I've been semi interested since Prime mentioned it a handful of times, but I feel maybe I'm too new to fully understand what I gain from it. As soon as I'm finish with my current project, I'd like to check it out.

For reference, I'm currently working within the T3 Stack.

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HTMX is just a convenient way of handling user-initiated UI updates AJAX calls (for whatever purpose). So instead of writing some JavaScript that looks for a specific element to attach an `onclick` event and subsequently makes an AJAX call then again searches for an element on the page to update with the result you can put some (very simple) HTMX code in the HTML directly and it'll handle that sort of thing automatically; "without having to think."

It's just a nice, convenient way of handling such things. The argument in the article is that "this is how HTML should've been from the start" because it lets you do some pretty sophisticated stuff just by adding some simple/intuitive attributes to the HTML.

So my apis need to return html specific to the page its called from with the data embedded? I guess my apis would need different endpoints that return json for other clients. And different endpoints for the exact same data if they need to be displayed differently? It just seems like a bad thing to couple. What about CSS? I guess you have to look at what the server returns to figure out how to select/style it.

I recognize thats how templates work but for some reason it seems weirder when applied to the element, rather than page level.

In there book, the authors specify that it is valid and normal to have additionnal endpoints for json. For exemple, Mastodon provide html endpoints as a interface for the user's browser, but also json endpoints for other clients (mobile app, cli tools, or others web app providing an alternative ui)

Interestingly enough, I have something planned that HTMX would be absolutely perfect for, can't wait to give it a try soon.

Simplicity. You don't have to become another React Andy and deal with all of the complexity that comes with it.

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