> When you click it, HTMX POSTs to /clicked, and whatever HTML the server returns replaces the button. No fetch(). No setState(). No npm install. No fucking webpack config.
Can someone explain something to me?
To my view, the single best idea React has is that it forces you to encapsulate the full set of states in your component - not anywhere else. For instance, if you have a "Comment" button that becomes "Submitted" after you click it, you must include that state inside the comment component. You can't hide it somewhere else (i.e., in the input field after you press cmd-enter). This is a huge thing for managing complexity - if you spread state updates to a number of different places, it becomes significantly harder to reason about how the button works.
Replacing the button with whatever the server responds with may sound simple, but it really makes it hard to answer the question of "what are all the states this button could be in". I mean, what if the server returns another button... which hits another API... etc?
The weird thing is that HTMX talks about Locality of Behavior (yay!), but doesn't seem to practice it at all?
BTW, one other thing:
> The ecosystem is why your node_modules folder is 2GB. The ecosystem is why there are 14 ways to style a component and they all have tradeoffs. The ecosystem is why "which state management library" is somehow still a debate.
> HTMX's ecosystem is: your server-side language of choice. That's it. That's the ecosystem.
Really? Python is my ecosystem. You know that people add stuff to their node_modules because they need it, right? It's not like we do it for fun. Where am I going to find a date-time picker in Python? Am I going to build it from scratch? Where is an autocomplete component in Python? Or mentions?