Great to see this evolution! Realtime ssr hypermedia is definitely the future.
But, my thoughts immediately go to Datastar, which has Fetch, SSE, declarative signals and js expressions, dom morphing, and much more - in a tiny package. I find it to have a more flexible, expressive and standards-compliant API as well. And it'll soon have a simple reactive web components and css framework as well.
At this point, why use HTMX when it really seems like (a heavier) Datastar-lite?
Because Datastar Pro isn't FOSS, and speaking from a purely probabilistic and historical standpoint, your odds of getting rugpulled (in some form or another) might as well be 100%.
I can appreciate why people would have this perspective - I have been rugpulled a few times recently by thoroughly unscrupulous companies (Augment Code are trash humans).
But Datastar is different. The project is literally owned by a 501c3 non-profit. The devs have dayjobs and donate their spare time to this. Funds are for going to conferences or hosting their own
And 99% of the features/value that I mentioned is MIT licensed, and the "rugpulled" code is still available to easily port via the plugin API.
And OpenAI was a non-profit. "Was" being the operative word.
Ah yes, one of the world's most valuable companies is totally a solid parallel for a few guys part-time making a simple, niche js framework whose pro license they discourage people from purchasing... Totally.
You don't know that, even if they were your brothers sitting in the room with you right now you don't know if they are or not.
How does this differ from any other open source project (most of which are not non-profits, and are utterly unsustainable)?
As much as I like Delaney, the discord server and Datastar I find this question baffling.
If the Postgres team released PGPro, swore it just contained anti patterns and you can just write the code yourself if you needed that feature, you’d roll your eyes, no?
It’s about the fact they went there, not about the intentions.
You are right! If this is enough to put you off the project then I hope you find one that aligns with your ideals.
Hey Delaney! Thanks for you and your teams work.
It doesn't put me off the project! I will happily pay for great software that enables me to make money just like I'd pay for good tools around the house (once I get started with D*).
I was just pointing out that in my mind the criticism is totally fair game because many OSS do not do this, that is all. By the looks of it you agree.
I think I want to just mention something here that is really important. The Datastar team have done more to push for performance, better UX and the ways of thinking around SPAs and MPAs than multi billion dollar companies have done in the last couple of years. Not forgetting HTMX, this cooperation has been incredibly fruitful and I am very excited about the future with you guys.
Oh noes, we agree on stuff. I don't know what to do now... stare at feet.
Yeah HTMX should rebrand as DATASTAR LIBRE.
Presumably Datastar is a trademark that shouldn't be used that way? (Or does the owner of HTMX also own Datastar?)
It's a joke.
I dont think they have a trademark. I also think they'd be completely in favour of HTMX rebranding to Datastar Libre.
As the Datastar author, I'd approve this effort
I took a look at Datastar, and pretty quickly realized I really don't like libraries which try to do so many different things. The surface area of the API is way too big. htmx is already too big for me, I tend to reach for mostly vanilla-only or small vanilla-adjacent solutions I can either write by hand or import. But as I've been experimenting with htmx (including its very good extensions API), I'm realizing it's in a pretty good sweet spot overall.
I'm very excited about htmx 4.0 and sounds like things are headed in a promising direction.
If you are looking for a very tiny foot print, you might like htmz-be.
I hope you realize literally everything is a plug-in. The core is < 4kb. Also Datastar is literally smaller than HTMX so this is already kinda funny
> why use HTMX when it really seems like (a heavier) Datastar-lite?
The reason to use htmx is that it has a simpler interface optimized for the majority use-case.
With htmx, you are largely tied to a request/reply paradigm. Something happens that triggers a request (e.g. user clicks a button, or some element scrolls into view), htmx sends the request, and then it processes the response. The htmx interface (`hx-get`, hx-trigger`) is optimized to make this paradigm extremely simple and concise to specify.
Datastar's focus (last I checked) is on decoupling these two things. Events may stream to the client at any time, regardless of whether or not they were triggered by a specific action on the client, and they get processed by Datastar and have some effect on the page. htmx has affordances for listening to events (SEE extension, new fetch support) and for placing items arbitrarily on the page (out-of-band swaps) but if your use-case is a video game or a dashboard or something else where the updates are frequently uncorrelated with user actions, Datastar makes a lot of sense. It's a bit like driving a manual transmission.
Delaney is fond of saying that there's no need for htmx when Datastar can technically do everything htmx can [0]. But I think this misses the point of what makes htmx so popular: most people's applications do fit within a largely request/reply paradigm, and using a library that assumes this paradigm is both simpler to implement and simpler to debug. As an htmx maintainer, I often encourage people to even use htmx less than they want to, because the request/reply paradigm is very powerful and the more you can adhere to browser's understanding of it, the more durable and maintainable your website will be [1].
[0] https://data-star.dev/essays/v1_and_beyond
[1] https://unplannedobsolescence.com/blog/less-htmx-is-more/
Respectfully, almost everything you said is just plain wrong.
1. Datastar supports req/reply just fine - be it via normal text/html responses, or SSE (0, 1, or infinity responses) https://data-star.dev/reference/actions#response-handling. So, the crux of your argument is moot...
Moreover, if htmx's real value is ajax request/response, then why are you introducing SSE as a first-class citizen now?
2. Datastar has data-on, and various other attributes, that allow for triggering far more actions than just backend requests, from far more (any) events. I'm glad to see that htmx is now following suit with hx-on, even if it is apparently limited in capabilities.
3. Datastar can do OOB-swaps just fine - that's literally the core functionality, via (their own, faster) idiomorph.
4. Its a misnomer that Datastar is for video games etc - again, as described above, it can do all of the simple things that that HTMX can do, and more. And, again, why is HTMX introducing SSE if its so apparently unnecessary and unwieldy?
5. What makes htmx popular is that it was the first library to make declarative fragment swapping easy. And Carson is just a god-tier marketer. Its nice to see that he's now realized that Delaney was on to something when he wanted to introduce all of these v4 features to HTMX 3 years ago, but was (fortunately for us happy users) forced to go make Datastar instead.
6. We havent even talked about one of the key features - declarative signals. Signals are justifiably taking over all of the JS frameworks and there's even an active proposal to make them part of the web platform. D* makes them simpler to use than any of them, and in a tiny package.
I, Delaney, and all other D* users are grateful for HTMX opening this door. But I reiterate my original question - now that HTMX is becoming Datastar-lite, why not just use Datastar given that the powerful extras don't add any complexity and comes in a smaller package?
So here's the htmx example for click to edit: [0]
<button hx-get="/contact/1/edit">
And here's the datastar one, edited for parity: [1]
<button data-on:click="@get('/contact/1/edit')">
The htmx one is simpler. There's fewer mini-languages to learn and the API makes more assumptions about what you want. As you noted, Datastar has more generalized mechanisms that are certainly less clunky than htmx's if you lean heavily into more signals- or event-driven behavior, but for (what I believe to be) the majority use-case of a CRUD website, htmx's simpler interface is easier to implement and debug.(For example: you will see the response associated with the request in the browser network tab; I'm not sure if Datastar has a non-SSE mode to support that but it wouldn't be true for SSE.) To each their own.
As for "well then why implement X, Y, or Z," as the OP notes, refactoring to use fetch() means you get them largely for free, without compromising the nice interface. So why not?
[0] https://htmx.org/examples/click-to-edit/
[1] https://data-star.dev/examples/click_to_edit
That tiny difference is hardly a reason not to use datastar, especially when it brings SO MUCH more useful stuff - all in a smaller package.
Moreover, the fact that Datastar is more generalized is actually better - HTMX has vastly more (non-standards-compliant) attributes that you need to learn.
https://htmx.org/reference/
vs
https://data-star.dev/reference/attributes
> I'm not sure if Datastar has a non-SSE mode to support that but it wouldn't be true for SSE.) To each their own.
My first point was literally saying that it has non-SSE and linked to the docs. You're not even trying to be objective here...
> So why not?
Yes, I have no problem with these things being implemented in v4. In fact, celebrated it in my original post. I brought it all up because you were describing that all as needless complexity in Datastar, but now you're implementing it.
Also, most of Datastar can be trivially disabled/unbundled because its nearly all plugins. That is largely not the case for HTMX.
Thus far, you've simply strongly confirmed my initial hunch that HTMX v4 is unnecessary compared to Datastar.
Less characters is not simple that's easy.
Which is why HTMX is having to bolt on more gubbins. Because, although it's less characters to type its fundamentally complected and therefore less composable.
I'm sure you've already warched it but if you haven't I'd recommend Rich Hickey's talk Simple made Easy.
I don't think the takeaway from Hickey's talk is just a blind 'simple is always good, easy is always bad'. It's actually important to offer 'easy' affordances in some cases. Htmx operates at a specific level of abstraction. This abstraction has been carefully chosen to work to create apps in a certain way. It's like a shortcut for creating a simple kind of hypermedia-driven app with some easy conveniences. I think this is a significant and important point in the design space.
The power in Datastar is YOU get to choose what plugins you use to build the API you what... want data-get, it's a few lines away from being yours! You can rebuild all of HTMX in Datastar, not the other way around. https://data-star.dev/examples/custom_plugin is a great intro
Yes, and the htmx philosophy is that it gives you some default functionality out of the box, it doesn't just hand you a bunch of building blocks and ask you to put everything together yourself. Both are valid approaches. I don't know why one side always has to come in and try to put down the other. Without htmx, there is no Datastar.
You are right! without HTMX 1 and the choices for future dev there would be no Datastar! If you think having a full framework while still allowing super easy way to make whatever API as you see fit is putting someone down, idk, ngmi.
That's not what I think. Just take a look at the top-level comments where Datastar supporters are coming in and doing the 'htmx 4 is just doing what Datastar does now, why do we need htmx' routine. First of all that's not even true, and secondly it's kinda transparent–whenever htmx gets discussed the Datastar fans show up to naysay.
the top-level comment (mine) literally celebrated the v4 changes, and I've done nothing but show respect and gratitude for HTMX.
I was simply asking, though, what I might be missing now that HTMX is becoming a (heavier) Datastar-lite (no signals and more). Given that these changes were literally previously rejected by HTMX and caused Datastar to even come into existence, it seems wholly appropriate to be making the comparison here.
Also, I can't speak for others, but when I've brought up Datastar in other HTMX-centric discussions here and elsewhere, its only when someone asks about things like SSE, idiomorph etc... I always say that if you're looking for those features, you might prefer to just use D... Now that those features are native to HTMX, I suppose they can just stay with it. But you get even more for less weight by moving to D
The largely nonsensical and overly-defensive responses from HTMX's devs/supporters have only made it clear to me that D* is the appropriate choice here.
Htmx supporters have explained why htmx over Datastar many times. This is not even the first thread about this topic. Even in this thread you can easily find people (including myself) explaining why htmx and what it does differently. We don't need to repetitively explain the same exact justifications every time someone asks. Do a little reading, it's all there.
If you are making technical decisions about web programming based on HN threads though, best of luck to you.
Lol
HTMZ-BE:
<a id="contact1" href="/contact/1/edit" role="button">Edit</a>
Hhhmmm..., that's more verbose than both :-(
"Their own faster idiomoroh"
HTMX's 4's morph is almost a copy paste of Datastar's.
To be fair, the idiomorph work came from Datastar and Turbo community efforts. There is a whole podcast about Micah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrtBBqyDrJU&pp=ygUOZGF0YXN0Y.... Latent has been a huge force behind these ideas as well!
Why bother with v4 at all? If it dilutes that simpler interface?
I think that even with req/resp morph leads to a simpler majority use case and that's what Turbo and Datastar have both shown. No?
> Why bother with v4 at all? If it dilutes that simpler interface?
v4 makes almost no changes to the interface, other than to flip inheritance to be off by default.
> I think that even with req/resp morph leads to a simpler majority use case and that's what Turbo and Datastar have both shown. No?
Although you can use the idiomorph extension for htmx, I personally don't think idiomorph is simpler, because there's an algorithm choosing what parts of the page get replaced based on the server response; I prefer to specify exactly what parts of the page get replaced in much simpler terms, a CSS selector, with `hx-target`.
Per [1] above, my style is minimize partial page responses wherever possible, so the ones that I do have are bespoke and replace a specific thing.
Your personal preferences aside. Full page morphs get you back to 3XX redirects of pure HTML (no JS forms) when you use them with req/resp.
https://dev.37signals.com/a-happier-happy-path-in-turbo-with...
With highly dynamic page where you would normally start using a front end lib, Idiomorph makes it so you can stick with the hypermedia approach instead.
Are you aware that v4 is baking idiomorph into the core...?
Yes! I expect that I will mostly be sticking to `hx-target` though, for the reasons stated above.
My interest in htmx is more on the coarse-grained aspects of its interface, not the finer ones, which is a consistent theme in my writings about it [0].
[0] https://alexanderpetros.com/triptych/
hey Alex, I hope you are well. Datastar has had direct support for req/rep of HTML, JS, JSON while still morphing for a quite a while. They allow you to go as coarse as you want. Give the size and ability to choose what plugins you actually need seems like Datastar is more in line with your wants at this point. Strange times.
It's actually baking in datastar morph. Which is even better.
The irony that the Datastar author originally tried to have those features added to HTMX a few years ago.
Better late than never. Everyone benefits with HTMX evolving and bringing more attention and capabilities to hypermedia-first approaches.
One important difference that I found is that HTMX (and Alpine AJAX) can easily push a URL into the browser's location history. I've used this feature often with my Django projects--essentially storing the state in the URL which is great for sharing URLs or bookmarking them. As far as I'm aware, Datastar have locked this feature behind the "Pro" paywall.
Fair. Though, D*'s authors are pretty adamant that this is an anti-pattern - that's why they put it behind the paywall.
Moreover, the FOSS code still exists and would take 2 minutes to update to the current plugin API (I have Datastar pro and the code is almost exactly the same)
https://github.com/starfederation/datastar/blob/v1.0.0-beta....
> D*'s authors are pretty adamant that this is an anti-pattern
The Datastar authors are wrong about this. History push is a very important part of the hypermedia-driven application approach. Because URLs are super important. And we want to make sure that the correct URL is shown for the currently-loaded view, and that the view is reproducible given the URL (as much as possible) so that bookmarking and copy-pasting to send URLs just works as expected.
A really nice article came out about this just recently: https://alfy.blog/2025/10/31/your-url-is-your-state.html
I also wrote a bit more about it here: https://dev.to/yawaramin/why-hx-boost-is-actually-the-most-i...
Thanks very much for a thoughtful reply and link to your article. I look forward to reading it.
As it turns out, I shared that very same article in the Datastar discord the other day! Here's some other good ones that I found while digging into the topic, for anyone who cares.
* https://warpspire.com/posts/url-design/
* https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/examples-of-great-urls/
* https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
* https://www.hanselman.com/blog/urls-are-ui
I strongly agree that good urls are very important. But I don't see how D* prevents correct urls/history at all... You can click anchor links just fine for pages that are genuinely separate pages. If its just a sub page, filter etc, then i think in many cases it should only swap into the dom without updating the history.
Moreover, am I wrong to think that if you use hx-boost to swap in fragments, then the URL that gets updated/saved in history wouldn't actually load the same page if you loaded it from a bookmark? That wouldn't happen with non-boosted anchor links.
Anyway, I'm not the best person to take up this argument. If you are interested at all in some respectful debate on the topic, it would be great if you came by the datastar discord where there's definitely people who would be better able to engage with it. I'd be eager to observe from the sidelines
"Moreover, am I wrong to think that if you use hx-boost to swap in fragments, then the URL that gets updated/saved in history wouldn't actually load the same page if you loaded it from a bookmark? That wouldn't happen with non-boosted anchor links."
It's a common pattern with Django and template partials that you check if the request is an AJAX request, in which case you just load a partial template to swap into the existing DOM. Or if it's not an AJAX request, your server-side logic loads the full template.
A simple example would be a to-do list at http://example.com/todo/. Clicking on a task item would swap it into the DOM without a full page load, and then you'd update the URL and browser history to http://example.com/todo/my-task/. Then if you open that URL in a new session, your server side logic would render your page with the "my-task" already selected.
> If its just a sub page, filter etc, then i think in many cases it should only swap into the dom without updating the history.
It depends. If it's a 'resource' (in the REST sense) then it should actually push the URL of the resource into history, because the URL should correspond to the currently viewed resource. This is exactly what I was talking about earlier, it's super important as a basic hypermedia principle.
> if you use hx-boost to swap in fragments, then the URL that gets updated/saved in history wouldn't actually load the same page if you loaded it from a bookmark
See amanzi's explanation or my blog post where I explain the same thing. With htmx we can easily check for the presence of a request header in the backend and serve the appropriate version of the resource: either a partial (fragment) rendering or a full page that contains the resource. I highly recommend reading my blog post: it's not a huge commitment and it will clarify these issues for you.
Pay for the antipatterns?
I'm too tired to parse this logic, but I suspect it is a novel entry in techcorp doublespeak/dirty tricks.
I think the logic is the following:
* Datastar was re-written from the ground up, numerous times.
* They didn't want to update and maintain the plugins that they viewed as unnecessary/anti-patterns
* People wanted them still, so they said "fine, pay us to port it". Or, do it yourself - the MIT code is sitting right there and the changes are not all that significant. You'd also learn more about D* while at it. I linked in the parent comment to the MIT code - would not be difficult for anyone to do.
I suspect that in the long-run (probably not too far from now), they'll just make those plugins MIT again as the real value of Pro is the inspector, and soon their WIP web component framework (Rocket) and css framework (stellar) - all of which have always been being a commercial license.
p.s. there's no techcorp here. Its literally 3 guys with day jobs donating their time to a 501c3-registered non-profit. Funds go to things like going to conferences, or holding their own.
> the real value of Pro is the inspector
Ah, yes, a debugging tool. Only professionals need those.
I can't tell what sort of sarcasm this is - whether youre saying that the inspector should be available to all, or that no one actually needs it.
Whatever the case, you dont truly need it, but it is helpful. You buy it for convenience as well as to support the project.
You just sound like a marketer or a cultist, and I'm not sure which one is worse.
Its worse than that - I'm a cult marketer/evangelist!
I'm interested in why this would be an anti-pattern? What would the alternative be?
I'm not qualified to comment as I don't use the feature, but people in their Discord would be happy to explain/discuss - its a wonderful place for learning more about the web, backend architecture and more.
I'm also sure this has already been explained in comments to other posts here as well.
It hasn't. Also, I'm definitely not going into the Datastar Discord. The main guy gets incredibly agitated and starts calling you names if you don't agree with him about anything lol
Check out window.history.pushState
The whole point of these frameworks is to not have to write JavaScript.
Not something I'd pay a premium for.
I agree!