Elena, a library for building Progressive Web Components

fyi I originally posted this link a few days prior to this thread (before the post you linked). But that post got no traction, and HN then resubmitted it on my behalf at the above post date.

Back when angularjs was first becoming popular and wide adoption of data- attributes through HTML 5 were being discovered, everyone and their dog wrote their own lightweight version of angularjs, which looks a lot like htmx / datastar.

They never really took off in large part because there wasn't good, performant support for MutationObserver, and thus few mechanisms for composability and live/ dynamic content.

With people remembering that not everything needs to be react or a single page app, it's nice to have something that sits in-between pure vanilla and something heavier.

We got out of the "framework of the week" mania years ago, but LLM use is making that make a bit of a comeback.

in this specific case, it's because authoring web components without any support is a bit of a pain, and stuff like lifecycle or reactivity gets boilerplatey very quickly.

One big difference between Datastar/HTMX and Solid/Svelte etc is the first two put almost all the logic in the backend, and the latter ones are SPA frameworks. Very different architecture. Backend rendering used to mean clunky experience but with Datastar’s SSE approach you can get better than SPA experience with a simpler mental model.

Well, now that components finally work we can have basic tooling for web pages...