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Comment by gofreddygo | Hacker News Reader

Ok I'll just say it, why not use jquery instead ?

With JQuery you're still writing JS to do everything. With HTMX, you write almost no JS. You write HTML which contains some directives like "hx-post='/clicked'" which will make a POST request to the `/clicked` URL path, similar to how HTML forms already work... and then you write the logic to generate more HTML in the server. That is: the server becomes responsible for the logic, not the client.

You can still do JS on the client here and there, but that becomes much less needed.

> With JQuery you're still writing JS to do everything. With HTMX, you write almost no JS.

...instead write it in htmx, and html partials server-side using a templating library. What could possibly be wrong with splitting up the presentation logic and spreading it throughout the backend instead of just writing a little bit of javascript?

No need to build and maintain a whole api layer?

One code base rather than two?

Simple pages become simple again?

With jQuery and AJAX you're still sending HTML fragments just like with HTMX.

> With jQuery and AJAX you're still sending HTML fragments just like with HTMX.

AJAX philosophy was based around client side render - Asynchronous Javascript And XML. XML was JSON before JSON.

jQuery is/was just a fetching library. The modern fetch() API as well as Promises/async/await made it largely obsolete, although some people still swear by it (they just released a new version actually). You can fetch raw HTML and dump it into innerHTML, but thats not how most people use it. They would do client-side render based on the XML (later JSON) returned.

In my case, I already write a considerable amount of presentation logic in my the Django side of my project, merely because of Django's templating language limitations (which is okay, I prefer writing it in a sane language instead of wrangling esoteric features of DTL to get what I want). So adding a view function for an HTMX endpoint isn't really "spreading it around the backend" if your workflow is similar to what I described.

Not writing javascript is a good enough reason for me tbh. Makes the world a better place.

I haven't personally used htmx(I use Vue and also like Svelte, and try to keep simple content in Markdown), but it seems declarative.

I assume the compiler can give warnings at compile time?

There's no compiler or compile time.

An early version of Htmx was in fact based on jQuery (https://intercoolerjs.org).

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