It's terrible, why would I want my endpoints to return random HTML fragments? I realize thats how you did it in the JQuery times, but I was never in those - at that time we simply had template engines in the backend so this HTML slop wouldn't contaminate everywhere..
Most of the frontend stuff I do is for internal pages on embedded devices, and I'm very happy with a structure where I have the frontend being a full React fancy component lib SPA that is eventually just compiled down to a zip bundle of files that the backend needs to know nothing about and can serve as dumb files. The backend is a JSON API of sorts that I would need to build anyway for other use cases.
Returning HTML sounds like a styling nightmare, if anyone changes the structure, unintended consequences. Plus it’s difficult to reason possible states of the UI with fragments sitting on the server, possibly dynamically built on the server. Very jquery/PHP ish. I had my fun and don’t want to go back.
To "get" HTMX, you have to think server-first. State is persisted on the server and all state-change logic is performed on the server (often triggered by http requests from a "dumb" client).
If you hang on to "possible states of the UI" that are client-side only then yes you'll have some difficulty implementing server-generated HTMX responses but more importantly, when your client has state that sometimes isn't in sync with, or shared with, or validated by your server, you're setting yourself up for errors and bugs that will exist regardless of framework.
In short, HTMX forces you to apply "single source of truth" concepts to your application.
Clearly you haven't used something like HTMX. Do you understand what "returning HTML by the server" mean? You are basically sending back a view, like you would in any other framework actually. This would be the exact same pattern as displaying or dynamically adding a new component from either React or Vue. It doesn't create any styling issue at all, nor any unintended consequences.
I’ve used jquery which is very heavy into html fragments. It can get unwieldy compared to keeping all your rending logic in one place and applying data to it like in React. Other comments here validate the suspicion that HTMX can fall apart in large systems.
Unless you’re saying the components returned by HTMX are using the shadow dom for isolation, you can very easily run into styling problems by changing a style and not realizing some injected fragment of HTML somewhere relies on it being a certain way. I hope you’re using a monorepo because unlike typescript APIs, those HTML fragments and CSS styles are not type checked.
Well yeah, HTMX wouldn't be a good fit for micro-frontends, but I didn't think many people were actually using those. You have to write all your html in accordance with a single stylesheet, but that strikes me as the least of HTMX's impositions.
That's because jquery takes a very global approach to the DOM, which will naturally lead to spaghetti code.
Every backend framework, be it dotnet or Symphony or Rails, has a concept of components. It's a non-issue.
The HTML fragments aren't random.
> It's terrible, why would I want my endpoints to return random HTML fragments?
What would you return instead? It's easy to generate HTML, because that's what your server is already generating (and that's about all it should generate).
HTML is the last thing I would ever want to generate on my embedded device, it's a terribly verbose string-based mess invariably coupled with stylistic choices. Which is why my servers don't generate any of that, they serve static files - and any interactive information in something that looks a lot more like an interface definition.
I don’t get what you’re saying (maybe there’s a typo). With React, generating HTML on the embedded device is exactly what you’re doing — twice (virtual and real DOM).
Okay, so what do you your servers actually serve stuff to?
I kind of don't get why if you want to display something in a web browser you'd generate anything other than HTML.
I think the parent's point is that when you have a react front-end, your back-end basically just deals in structs of data. There's no HTML or templating to think about. It's just JSON-serialisable structs. That makes the code on the back end much simpler, which makes it easier to run in a resource-constrained environment.
The only exposure the back-end has to HTML is streaming the static files to the browser. Which can be done in small chunks.
If your back-end is rendering HTML with every request, it has to do a lot more work. It has to load HTML templates into memory and insert strings into them.
Okay, so how do you actually show the stuff to the end user?
Just raw structs of data? Or do you turn that back into HTML?
Now you've got two sets of templates to cope with...
Why would I care about how much effort it is for the server to generate? It's already generating HTML from templates, and it's more-or-less infinitely capable of doing so.
> It has to load HTML templates into memory and insert strings into them.
In practice, I doubt this is much slower than serializing JSON. Keeping a couple kilobytes of HTML templates in memory is nothing. Conversely, running a whole vdom on the frontend (typically more resource-constrained than the server) is a much bigger performance issue.
Three levels down and people have entirely forgotten what my post was. My "server" is some anemic ARM core built into real physical hardware with 64M of read-only storage. I don't want it spending its time "hydrating" some DOM, I don't want to bring any of this frontend insanity on there at all. No code hosted on npm shall ever run on that processor or I can't go to sleep in peace.
So how do we still get a fancy SPA website? Build it all down to a simple zip bundle, the ARM can serve those static files just fine. The SPA talks to the ARM via a few JSON APIs. Very nice clean boundary.
Yes, if your server is a weak, limited processor, you want to keep the demands on it as low and lean as possible, and let the client do the heavy lifting. HTMX is not a good fit for this scenario, just like PostgreSQL is not a good database to embed on your devices.
This isn't a controversial idea and nobody would try to sell you on HTMX for your use case.
1. No, templating strings is actually quite cheap. I'm doubtful that you could benchmark any substantial difference between templating html and serializing json.
2. Who has a server with a weak, limited processor? HTML templates power Django, Rails, and PHP. This paradigm worked fine on the servers of 20 years ago, in the slowest languages we use. I could serve a Django app on my phone and see reasonable performance.
I agree that templating is very fast and efficient, probably faster than serializing to JSON.
Read the OP's posts - he is talking about a "server" being an embedded device with 64mb of read-only storage. My assumption is that the data output format is basically hard-coded in the device's OS and doesn't even rely on JSON serialization.
Oh wait, oh my god
> Three levels down and people have entirely forgotten what my post was.
I missed this reply entirely. Whoops.
That said, I do feel like you can do HTML templates on a tiny chip with 64 megs of memory. I've seen NASes with comparably tiny & terrible chips serve their web UIs this way: paper-thin html templates with <form>s for interactivity and <table>s for layout.
But that's the point of something like HTMX, though.
You draw a simple web page with very basic elements, tag them with an HTMX element, and let the client side javascript turn that into something that "does stuff".
I wrote a phone directory with find-as-you-type using Django (because it's what I had lying around) and HTMX (because I read somewhere that it was cool and fun and I should try it, and I bow easily to peer pressure), and then min.css to make it not look shit.
All totally vendored, just download the appropriate .js and .css file and check them into your source control.
When you type it hits an endpoint that returns a bit of HTML that contains a table, and swaps it into a div. The querying part and the drawing part is client-side and there's nothing stopping you passing a query string to the endpoint and getting just a bare table out.
Indeed there's nothing stopping you detecting if it's an HTMX request and only returning the fragment, or if it's "bare" returning a full valid page. You know what? I should do that, I'll log a feature request on my project for it.
I've gotten a little away from the original point.
You use HTMX on the client side, to turn a plain HTML page with no interactivity into something that will pull data from a backend and swap it into the DOM. If you want to return JSON and render that with yet another library you can, but you're probably already filling in the blanks in an HTML template as it is.
My understanding is that HTML templating is often cheaper server-side than JSON serialization.
What's npm got to do with it?
Why can't your code fill in the blanks in some HTML template instead of filling in the blanks in some JSON?
What's the difference between rendering HTML and rendering JSON?
Why are you then offloading rendering HTML from JSON to a painfully slow scripting language on the client?
This is plain false.