Hacker News Reader

Comment by wg0 | Hacker News Reader

I am a very anti react person but I believe that HTMX alone isn't enough. The problem that React solves (and Svelte solves much more elegantly) is not that of reactivity etc but of being able to describe your UI in terms of components and then build your application from those lego blocks.

HTMX leaves that component problem to the server side templating instead and IMHO that is a far more loose and leaky abstraction.

View on HN

Yours is definitely the correct historical take. Frontend frameworks really started to take off when componentization became the norm, first in early angular with directives, and later when components were immortalized with React. Web components tried to bring us back from the land of JS, but the implementation left much to be desired for those who had already taken the leap into framework land.

This is exactly why I always recommend that htmx is best used not with a traditional templating engine, but with an HTML generation library embedded directly in your favourite programming language. Eg if you use Python there is https://htpy.dev/ - and many others in other languages.

What these all do is they allow using the full power of your programming language to create component-like abstractions much like you would in React. I show an example of this with my own library: https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html/tree/todoapp/app

What makes describing your UI with components that use a html template fragment and receive a context object a leaky abstraction, as opposed to components that use JSX and receive a props object?

> describe your UI in terms of components

Yeah, that seems to fit as the cause quite well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com