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Comment by n4pw01f | Hacker News Reader

Replace React / Vue with HTMX 2 years ago and still going strong.

Hono + WebComponents + HTMX + serverless is the backend for my apps now.

What is the point of using HTMX if your backend is JavaScript(Hono)?

Adopting something like HTMX is primarily a UX choice, and the language you use to serve it is almost irrelevant to UX. JavaScript is a nice backend language. It’s fast, has a massive ecosystem, and many people know it well.

I don't see how HTMX has anything to do with UX. Could you clarify what you mean?

Sure. I personally think SPAs/React have better DX than HTMX. IMO, the most compelling reasons to use HTMX instead (for building dynamic/interactive web applications) are to reduce the amount of JavaScript sent to the client and make pages become interactive faster. These are UX concerns: how much the user has to download (waiting) and how long before the page becomes interactive (waiting).

With HTMX, you get these benefits regardless of what language you use on the server. These benefits could be reasons the parent commenter chose HTMX, and JavaScript is a perfectly good language to serve HTMX applications for the reasons I mentioned.

> the most compelling reasons to use HTMX instead (for building dynamic/interactive web applications) are to reduce the amount of JavaScript sent to the client and make pages become interactive faster

Next.js and TanStack Start don't send any JavaScript to the client if you decide to server-render everything. The upside is that you can opt-in into client-side components, and have all the interactivity benefits of React. I understand using HTMX if you are building a backend in Go/Python/..., but if you are already using Node, I see no reason not to use TanStack Start instead.

Maintenance burden, supply chain attacks and the constant dependency upgrade treadmill. With a very minimal footprint app, you can avoid all that to a large extent.

> Next.js and TanStack Start don't send any JavaScript to the client if you decide to server-render everything.

AFAIK, this isn’t true. And you still get more JS per interactive element than with HTMX.

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