HTMx - back to basics
January 14, 2025
I felt the urge to write a tutorial. Maybe I’m the last human that will write one now that AIs are baked in everywhere. But that urge comes when I stumble on a new things, ways of working or ideas - and now I’ve reading, playing around with and used HTMx for awhile and I’m hooked.
HTMx totally rubs me the right way now that building a plain old web site, with some login-capabilities and personal data requires a SPA framework of hundreds of megabytes (2.802.804 lines of code…).
That’s a lot. And a lot to learn. Finally, the whole “API returns JSON” - “SPA framework turns JSON to HTML” dance feels pretty redundant, when you think about it.
I’m going to try to avoid to make this and Old Man Rant (tm), but first let’s go back in time to life before SPAs, and I’ll show how we...