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Ask HN: Why Htmx So Controversial?

5 points by martinbaun ↗ HN
It seems like people either hate it or love it? Personally I love it, so I can't really see why you would hate it. What are the great arguments against it?

11 comments

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PaulHoule
I like it. It is a perfect framework for my smart RSS reader and my image sorter where I want to do some simple things like putting up modal dialogs, implementing multiple-stage selects, combo boxes, things like that.

React can handle apps with much more complex state and do really amazing things like

https://aframe.io/

but it is overkill for the common form applications it is commonly used for.

martinbaun
Well I (and my company) do VueJS as well and the time to make a product is usually like 2/3x longer with VueJS and it is not server side rendered so bad for SEO. AND not as robust.

What we normally do is sprinkle HTMX/AlpineJS/VueJS(cdn version) into SSR apps and they are seemlingly looking like SPAs

caprock
Most of the controversy is tongue in cheek fun, from the numerous co-ceo staff. It's hard to keep so many people aligned.

Perhaps though, it's because it offers significant difference to the deep abstractions embraced by r eact and friends.

martinbaun
maybe it is, HTMX people and the founder also seem to be great at memeing and making controversy hehe.

Yeah, a completely different "new"/(kinda old) way of doing stuff.

recursivedoubts
it’s a very different way of thinking about web development and has it’s strengths and weaknesses so it’s easy for someone who is really deep in the SPA/reactive JavaScript world to look at it and say “this is stupid, whatabbout…”

also my twitter account is a strong drink compared to most tech accounts which alienates some people (“but you have heard of me…”)

martinbaun
Yeah, like they say that the people behind the old paradigms have to die before new paradigms can emerge.

What's your twitter? You're the author of Hyperscript?

recursivedoubts
https://twitter.com/htmx_org

yes, i created htmx.org and hyperscript.org