But easy things are also relatively easy when using other tools that scale up better. Even if HTMX makes the easy things slightly easier, is that worth investing time and energy into learning it in addition to those tools that scale up better? Is it worth building things with it if I know that months down the line I'm going to need to scrap it once my easy thing becomes slightly less easy?
Like I said, this seems like a poor value proposition to me. Of course, if other people are happy with it more power to 'em.
To me it feels like people are eager to latch onto this because it's different, and because there's a dopamine hit associated with seeing the easy thing become a little easier when taking a new path that's overoptimized for it - hence the hype - not because it's actually good engineering, in terms of the tradeoffs you're making.
Of course, I feel the same way about Tailwind, so maybe I'm just old and grumpy.
Because it's a drop-in, no-dependency, no build-step library that can make your static MPA a little less static for the little bits of interactivity you need with not much effort. It's what you reach for to avoid "write the whole website in JS."
React -> "The site exists in JS, HTML is just a render target."
jQuery -> "Poke at the HTML from JS." Which is brittle as hell.
htmx -> "The site exists in HTML, extend HTML to handle the common tasks you want to do with it."
> Even if HTMX makes the easy things slightly easier, is that worth investing time and energy into learning it in addition to those tools that scale up better?
Depends what your aim is. Do you want to become a full time front end engineer? Then no, probably focus on other frameworks. But do you, from time to time, want to put small pieces of interactivity on web pages when it isn’t the sole (or even major) focus of your job? Htmx might be ideal.
Like I said, this seems like a poor value proposition to me. Of course, if other people are happy with it more power to 'em.
To me it feels like people are eager to latch onto this because it's different, and because there's a dopamine hit associated with seeing the easy thing become a little easier when taking a new path that's overoptimized for it - hence the hype - not because it's actually good engineering, in terms of the tradeoffs you're making.
Of course, I feel the same way about Tailwind, so maybe I'm just old and grumpy.