It's weird how projects like Turbolinks, intercooler, and pjax just don't get acknowledged in histories like this one.
what other options did i have?
Entire companies have been built around the premise of good developer marketing, and if you're faang, you simply get to impose whatever developer trends you want to see in the market.
I'll never forget how wildly popular Stripe became overnight because of how easy their SDK's were - people were happy to give them a higher % of each transaction (all the stripe competitors at the time were cheaper -- this isn't true anymore, but was at the time). It always blew my mind that people were so willing to give up a % of each transaction to save an extra couple days of development.
Developers in general are notoriously susceptible to marketing trends and if you're building a dev tool that you want to gain traction you absolutely have to play that game.
i've tried to produce a lot of technical content, arguing for htmx on its merits:
but the reality is that marketing is what gets people to that content. I tried for years to convince people on pure technical merit alone, and only made halting progress.
i also got very lucky that a few things all came together at once:
* the primeagen & fireship_dev both covered htmx * we released our book * the twitter algorithm changed to boost funny stuff/memes
Fixed that for you. I think this is the real reason.
On top of that, the breadth and depth of its complexity and ecosystem and the solutions it helped build means it's really not going away in a hurry.
Updating a 2013 site from jQuery to Angular was small potatoes compared to updating a site now from react to react2.
Its complexity and ecosystem will be its Achilles Heel. There are no small number of examples of folks rewriting their React apps in weeks or even a weekend in something like Svelte. SolidJS is "close enough" in code patterns that folks will be very tempted to jump ship. Vue now has a JSX option.
But here's the kicker: frameworks like Svelte don't need wrappers around vanilla JS libraries like React has. It can use them, but it doesn't need them like React does due React's VDOM and execution model.
In 2012, jQuery and jQuery plug-ins were everywhere and necessary. YUI was dead/dying. Mootools and PrototypeJS were already quite dead. That inertia couldn't stop React despite the rewrites.
Because let's face it. We love rewriting front ends, and every rewrite erases the past. No one's gonna choose a rewrite in React if they have any notion of the alternatives.
There are 1980s mainframes still running COBOL, especially in older, more conservative industries like banking. Those same banks have cycled their public web front ends literally dozens of times since the mid 1990s.
PHP still does A LOT of heavy lifting even if the front ends have bounced between scriptless HTML forms, PrototypeJS, Mootools, YUI, jQuery, Angular, React, etc.
It's not about programming language on the front end (unless that language is JavaScript, but that's a whole other conversation). It's the implementation of layers on top of JavaScript and the browser APIs, and those will remain rapidly shifting sand for quite some time.
Remember, jQuery had about a decade of prominence in the web dev community before the component-based frameworks were released and fairly abruptly drowned it out. That said, jQuery is still far and away the most popular JS library deployed today.
https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library
React isn't going away, but something else will always eventually take center stage and suck all the oxygen out of the room during new web dev planning.
That it's still in active development with tons of users?
https://blog.jquery.com/2023/08/28/jquery-3-7-1-released-rel...
God, I hope not.
The JS ecosystem destroys the past like nothing else.