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Comment by lazypenguin | Hacker News Reader

I also prefer Datastar but the new features coming in HTMX4 closes the gap more. Happy to see the ecosystem converging on good patterns.

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But the point is that Datastar only exists because htmx rejected all of those ideas. Now it's becoming a cheap, more complex, less powerful, heavier copy of Datastar. Just use the genuine article.

I would just go all the way to using https://unpoly.com/ if I wanted the full-bang whiz.

Last I checked Datastar doesn't support progressive enhancement. I like using <a href hx-boost=true> and <form method action hx-boost=true> so almost all my functionality works even without JavaScript. See https://dev.to/yawaramin/why-hx-boost-is-actually-the-most-i...

Its not evident to me that that is really a concern when datastar is so small, and most of the js is written inline.

Moreover, htmx can only do a fraction of what datastar does - you'd need to add on something like alpinejs to be able to try to fill the gaps. Both combined are much larger than datastar, and not nearly as integrated.

It’s a concern because I use htmx for loading and updating resources and I want those operations to work as well as possible even without JavaScript. I’ve never felt the need for Alpine.js, I have very little I need to do with custom JS, and it’s trivial to maintain that by hand.

Datastar has evolved into a suite of tools [1]. If anything the gap has widened.

Off-course these additional tools are not free [2].

[1] Rocket for WebComponents, Stellar for CSS

[2] Nothing wrong in charging but $349 is a tad too expensive for me. I will happily pay if it was in double digits.

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