Htmx is a great front-end library, but its x account is full of memes | Hacker News Reader

Htmx is a great front-end library, but its x account is full of memes

x.com

8 pointspmig27 comments

Relax and unclench, guys. htmx is not the first project or product to shitpost on Twitter, and it won't be the last. https://www.socialmediamagazine.org/wendys-twitter

Why "but" rather than "and"? Do memes make it a worse front-end library?

It’s extremely immature and unprofessional.

It seems to have gotten the marketing job done surprisingly well considering people on HN getting outraged. I'd have never heard of it if it wasn't for this submission.

I would never use it because of this submission.

Relax. “Professionalism” of this sort is almost as nebulous a concept as it is overrated.

i'm a one man shop in montana, competing w/ Google, Vercel & Facebook for dev mindshare

if i did what everyone else does you never would have heard of htmx

https://star-history.com/#bigskysoftware/htmx&Date

Alright, you be you. I'll never knowingly use your code though.

Maybe I'm an old fart, but to me (and others) a lack of professionalism betrays a lack of seriousness and concern for downstream users.

i don't trust my code either, but I do trust my test suite:

https://htmx.org/test/

re: downstream users, I'm extremely concerned w/backwards compatibility (htmx 1.x is IE11 compatible and will be supported in perpetuity, as is intercooler.js, its predecessor), the library is dependency free, it works with any kind of back-end you'd like and doesn't demand any particular type of build system.

The library is BSD-0 licensed to maximize its usefulness and I do a deep dive on the implementation here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=javGxN-h9VQ

I've written a book on htmx and the broader ideas of hypermedia you can read for free here:

https://hypermedia.systems

and I have a series of essays on hypermedia and related topics here:

https://htmx.org/essays

I also wrote this:

https://grugbrain.dev

it is, unfortunately, silly

When any new tech gets hyped enough, some people instinctively drag it, if not for technical reasons then for aesthetic and social ones. If the worst thing people can say about HTMX is that its creator posts memes, the tech itself must be doing pretty well.

Professional - person who is paid to undertake a specialized set of tasks and to complete them for a fee.

Lets not be literal but also lets not ignore the clues.

How those wonderful technological babel towers coming from all those very serious professionals at FAANG and adjacent often with yearly marketing budgets bigger than your net worth have been treating you? Funny thing, many of those cool frameworks seem to get "deprecated" when the authors ( very professional and serious people ) get promoted or leave the company.

At least they tend "sunset" the libs and frameworks in a very professional and concern way.

On a less facetious note: Your "fears" are valid and common, but you are so focused on the package design you're missing the actual product.

How many ambitious projects have been started by young people and pushed to GitHub, but abandoned when a shinier thing comes by? Edge lording and meme posting on twitter makes me think this outcome is more likely.

It's a heuristic, but one that has served me well.

You should read past the cover page. Guy is legit, cs prof, and a fellow old guy. He’s been at this a long time and by all means should write a modern day marketing book too. Some of his other code is getting pretty wide distribution (in rails). Worth learning about imho even if you don’t use it.

I call confirmation bias.

> lack of professionalism

Professionalism is what you expect when you pay someone money. If we started calling things we don't like 'unprofessional', then the fact that you find fault with someone who is pouring their own time and money into giving away software to the world for free, could be called 'unprofessional'.

Judging by the results it seems mature and professional enough to me, including the meme based marketing. And the mission is right too.

Y'all need to be able to separate the shitposting and the technology itself. Though I'd like there to be a bit more serious posts tweeted by the account, I do have to admit that my own account is not any better than this, and the outreach that is generated by this tactic is absolutely working for htmx.

On a side note, though I dislike the pollution of the attributes that is promoted by the library, it does work quite well, and no one who uses tailwind-like helper classes has really a leg to stand on when it comes to complaining about messing up the html syntax.

Anyone who makes business decisions around what tech to use based on the creator posting memes is 100% NGMI.

Honestly I love how many of y'all self own with this. Keep using old, worse technologies. Us startups will take every advantage we can get :)

Wasn't the mantra back then was not to pollute attributes with js? Like onclick="alert(1)"

Now Htmx puts abstracted JS into attribues. Nice.

The use of memes plus the above tells everything you wanted to know about it. Just don't use it.

We are actually considering it internally as it solves our problem in combination with go templates and server side rendering.

how do you feel about the href attribute?

The first time I saw their X account I wasn't sure if it was serious project or not. Is this a valid marking strategy?

Perhaps your question is rhetorical but we're talking about it here aren't we?

Yes, but only because I wonder if its just me or other people super skeptical about this account..

I think lots of folks are skeptical, but I think that's as much because he's challenging the status quo of "build SPAs w/ React" as much as his shitposting.

What would you consider a "valid" marketing strategy? It's a project some dude on the internet provided as open source. Try it out and use it if it helps you solve your problem. It's not that complicated.

Great marketing in my opinion

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