I kind of hoped the long term result of htmx, instead of just being a Javascript library, was to become a standard in a newer version of HTML itself. The constraints of only forms being able to do POSTs, and the only way to handle the response is to rewrite the entire page seems arbitrarily limiting. If htmx were just HTML6 or whatever, it'd outlive all the Javascript frameworks.
The most visible part of jQuery for me was always querying selectors - $('.some > a.selector'); and that certainly was something integrated into HTML/the DOM as document.querySelectorAll('.some > a.selector').
The difference is that the internet can exist (and did) quite well without JavaScript. Without HTML there is no internet. Furthermore, ECMAScript is a language and W3C/WHATWG are a consortium that maintain HTML.
I have thrown together a minimalist extension to HTML that I think captures the core ideas of htmx, although you are right that there are still some outstanding issues that probably need additional thinking to make it widely useful:
I'd vote for being able to put an href attribute on any element (eg <div href=""> and <span href="">), and maybe binning <a> entirely. That seems like such an obvious enhancement to me, I figure there's probably a deep reason it hasn't been done.
Not sure of why it was done then, but currently for accessibility a link says, "This takes you to another page / URL" while a button says, "This performs some action / triggers some event."
If everything and anything is clickable, how does technology that supports accessibility handle that? Note: This isn't a way-a-figure-you-fool question. Not at all. It's a sincere question in the sense that accessibility matters, we can't forget that. So if we change, how can we be certain accessibility isn't left behind?
Yeah, I wondered if it was accessibility, or maybe a limitation to support text browsers.
To take the opposite view, there's not much we can't wrap in an <a> since HTML5 (eg <a href=""><div></div></a> is valid, and makes the div clickable). How do accessible browsers support that today?
w/ an explicit and declarative syntax, but that attribute is fairly involved
this was a brief exercise in thinking about the minimal changes necessary to HTML to support something like htmx, and unfortunately there isn't any attribute that maps to hx-trigger in the same way there is for other htmx attributes, so I resorted to the on* attributes + generalizing the submit() function on forms.
Yes and no. You wouldn't call a <form> inlining JS while it does come with some degree of interaction. It would be an expansion of HTML to include a few new things to (ideally) enable a wider rage of lightly-interactive websites to be HTML only.
I literally just started with htmx, but can’t you override both of those behaviors? hx-<http verb> on the form will switch the verb it uses, and you can swap outerhtml, innerhtml, or some other css target?
I think you've slightly misread - they specified only forms can do POSTs, not that forms can do only POSTs. (Also, they're talking about vanilla HTML, not HTMX).
> The constraints of only forms being able to do POSTs
HTML elements shouldn't do POSTs, that's why JavaScript exists. <form> and <a> are elements that do HTTP requests but the same can be added to any other html or custom element. html integration with JS doesn't need another layer.
