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Comment by bottlepalm | Hacker News Reader

Returning HTML sounds like a styling nightmare, if anyone changes the structure, unintended consequences. Plus it’s difficult to reason possible states of the UI with fragments sitting on the server, possibly dynamically built on the server. Very jquery/PHP ish. I had my fun and don’t want to go back.

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To "get" HTMX, you have to think server-first. State is persisted on the server and all state-change logic is performed on the server (often triggered by http requests from a "dumb" client).

If you hang on to "possible states of the UI" that are client-side only then yes you'll have some difficulty implementing server-generated HTMX responses but more importantly, when your client has state that sometimes isn't in sync with, or shared with, or validated by your server, you're setting yourself up for errors and bugs that will exist regardless of framework.

In short, HTMX forces you to apply "single source of truth" concepts to your application.

Clearly you haven't used something like HTMX. Do you understand what "returning HTML by the server" mean? You are basically sending back a view, like you would in any other framework actually. This would be the exact same pattern as displaying or dynamically adding a new component from either React or Vue. It doesn't create any styling issue at all, nor any unintended consequences.

I’ve used jquery which is very heavy into html fragments. It can get unwieldy compared to keeping all your rending logic in one place and applying data to it like in React. Other comments here validate the suspicion that HTMX can fall apart in large systems.

Unless you’re saying the components returned by HTMX are using the shadow dom for isolation, you can very easily run into styling problems by changing a style and not realizing some injected fragment of HTML somewhere relies on it being a certain way. I hope you’re using a monorepo because unlike typescript APIs, those HTML fragments and CSS styles are not type checked.

This is easy to solve. Just configure htmx to automatically add an `Accept-Version` header to its requests:

    document.addEventListener('htmx:configRequest', evt => {
      evt.detail.headers['Accept-Version'] = APP_VERSION;
    });

And have a middleware that checks for this header. If it finds a version mismatch, have it respond with an HTTP 400 and a message to update the app to get the latest version. This is pretty similar to what many SPAs are already doing nowadays so it shouldn't come as a big surprise.

Well yeah, HTMX wouldn't be a good fit for micro-frontends, but I didn't think many people were actually using those. You have to write all your html in accordance with a single stylesheet, but that strikes me as the least of HTMX's impositions.

That's because jquery takes a very global approach to the DOM, which will naturally lead to spaghetti code.

Every backend framework, be it dotnet or Symphony or Rails, has a concept of components. It's a non-issue.

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