The Future of HTMX

Wait.. html was designed for printers? Seriously? There is no mention of printers on the wikipedia page, and printing html files is always a pain in the butt.

0:10 WebAssembly is bad? Sometimes Theo thinks the world ends at the horizon of frontend dev. Yeah, the rust project aiming to render UI on a canvas was a failure. But what about running FFMPEG in client side? Or any custom string/image manipulation C++ libs, that already exist, and are able to run 50x times faster than crappy js impl in a web worker?

10:00 JSON wasnt really invented as such but was always a language feature in JS, the object notation scheme. Prior to JSON parsers people would use eval() to parse JSON. Its not that you couldnt do dynamic stuff prior to ajax, it was just a hack, you would add script tags to the DOM and then you would load a new script, this technique was called JSONP later, but it was used for a decade before that name. Honestly I think that "react made it easier" is a very controversial take, frontend has become super complex and abstract compared to using just JS and HTML. Sometimes its for the better, but honestly most react projects I have seen have been unmaintainable junk, almost worse than jquery in terms of readability. I think modern webdev adds too much complexity, every static website these days is some kind of react+next.js monster SPA that loads like 100x more code than it loads actual content for the end user, to be frank, react+next.js has turned the internet into ASS, all the SPAs make competitors to google and bing a pipe dream because of the cost and complexity involved in indexing these "apps" that should just have been like 5 html files.

I've been creating websites for 15 years, with modern with technologies I lose so much time fighting with the tools rather working on implementation. It has it use cases but for a simple website I feel it's overkill. The day we have native html/js components with slots, scoped css and reactivity that aren't a complete nightmare is going to a glorious day

I've been using what I call the "GOTHAM" stack - Go, Templ (templating, works great at composing fragments), Tailwind, HTMX, AlpineJS (js in HTML), and Air & Make for Dx (hot reloading and trigger Templ codegen).

Outlook Web Access, together with XmlHttpRequest was in Year 2000, by Microsoft. Gmail was 2004

I remember when jQuery was a godsend, it saved us from having to deal with all the inconsistent browser implementations. I still use it today. I just dont like how painful it is to debug through all the wrapper functions

37:10 You can create polygons in excalidraw by connecting line's starting point with ending point and setting background on it.

The most-brilliant Theo I’ve seen. This perspective on a historical review of web development is insightful well beyond HTMX (as someone reading the title of the video might be expecting).

Thanks a ton for putting this together. Really appreciate it.