I have a lot of experience in JS - even contributed to MooTools back in the day, until the team left to create React.
I run node on one server, Nginx with Php on another, and have plenty experience with many of the front end frameworks.
Try designing a web page - say the product page of a shoe store - multiple times. First try as though you have React (or Vue, Svelte, Angular, etc.), but never heard of HTMX, then try with HTMX as though you never heard of React, etc.
OK, its a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, especially if you would use hotwire or whatever.
Now, test those pages for responsiveness and ease of maintenance.
I did that, and the HTMX version won hands down. I was pretty surprised. You should try it; then comment again.
I now use HTMX extensively, and avoid frameworks unless they would really save time and effort.
This is good, a real objective evaluation. I think most of the critics of HTMX stems from pure front-end devs who are not really concerned of the back-end side.
While HTMX is tailor made/simple, for those who needs to build full-stack, while also having the great experience of SPAs.
Granted, it will never be able to compete with powerful JS frameworks on an apple-to-apple comparison, but that's not what it's designed for, It's an upgrade of HTML, not JS.
> "Using htmx is reminiscent of the dark times of web development directly over ftp without using a version control system."
Were those really the issues in the dark times?
To me those times are back when very incompatible scripting languages, with very incompatible browser DOM implementations roamed the land.
The simplicity of MPAs, the immediate feel of just writing to disk and refreshing the browser, without any slow transpilation process - this is how I remember the "dark times" of htmx.
I like HTMX. I just needed to put together a SPA and I have limited JS skills. HTMX was pretty easy to pick up and it was the easy bridge between my frontend and backend that I needed, while giving also allowing me to add some basic interactivity. I think its pretty cool.
I like it too for now. Htmx + Caddy (goodbye nginx), Bulma (css) and Fastapi (python backend). All this for a student management SPA. My day job as a school teacher means (A) I have to deal with outdated monolithic webapps daily, and (B) I don't exactly have all the time in the word to write software. This stack has been a godsend.
