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Comment by avarun | Hacker News Reader

Why did they skip version 3?

As a joke. Back when 2 came out, they promised there would never be a version 3. I.e., no breaking changes. Then they realized they did need to make a breaking change, so the only way to be true to their promise was to skip version 3.

This can be a good summary of htmx overall; a confident solution based on half understanding of the problem domain.

You’ve misunderstood the reason for v4; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49493929

No, you misunderstand what is going on. htmx is an exercising in learning web development by someone who didn’t follow 2 decades of web development progress.

He is catching up though, now approaching the early 2010s jQuery (moxi) and backbonejs era with fixiproject.org

Htmx is a direct descendant of Intercooler.js, which has been around since circa 2013, more than a decade. Intercooler still exists and is used in production, and you can clearly see that it works almost exactly the same way as htmx does today, it just bundles jQuery together.

The creator has been working on these ideas for a long time, but the core idea–swapping HTML from the server into the DOM–has been constant throughout.

It's exactly because he followed the past two decades of web dev that htmx avoids almost everything about it. Fixi and htmx extensions follow the 80/20 principle and can work by just being dropped in with a script tag. You don't need an elaborate npm setup, same as everything else in the htmx ecosystem.

The creator is stuck in 2012 and so on as I said. If you look at project fixie, the reason htmx 4 exists, it shows how the 80/20 is an incomplete idea for something as general as a web framework. 80/20 might work for your specific use case, but as a general notion, it either gets built on reasonable constructs or grows into a Frankenstein. Htmx approach is a mirror of yaml in my ways. In denial of what it is trying to be and so turns into complete monster.

Are you sock-puppeting two different user accounts in this discussion? https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=asdfsa32

I didn’t realize that was allowed.

What do HN mods think of that, dang?

Maybe it is just that people see the same problem when it is obvious?

Haha, good one. You said ‘the creator is stuck in 2012 as I said’. Except that was said by a different user account ;-)

> now approaching the early 2010s

Correction: they didn’t ‘realize they needed to make a breaking change’, they got excited by the improvements they could unlock by using the Fetch API and wanted to make a breaking change.

The upgrade is completely voluntary: it won’t even be set as the default version in npm till next year, and there are no known security issues that would force anyone to upgrade. People happy with v2 can just stay on it for the foreseeable future.

Carson promised they'd never do a version 3...but he never said they couldn't do a version 4.

I'm so pumped for v8!

this guy gets it

Exponential versioning. Next major would be 8.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com