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A comment on Please Just Try Htmx. Parent comment

Re:Please Just Try Htmx by IgorPartola on Thursday December 18, 2025 @07:09PM (#46320658)
I have never loved the idea of the server rendering HTML which is probably why I have such a hard time with HTMX. In every other paradigm you clearly separate your server API and UI rendering/logic. Web apps are the only place where it seems common to have the server render UI components. Imagine if you had a Java or Swift application and had the server sending your phone UI screens. I don’t even know how you would pitch that. About the only thing I have seen that makes some sort of sense here is video game rendering to be able to play on really limited devices with quick internet access.

The problem with SPAs is the ecosystem. I recently found packages like this [1] and this [2] in my node_modules and that is insanity. But the architecture honestly makes way more sense than any other paradigm: server side is a well defined API and the client renders UI and handles local state.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/isarray

[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-string

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Re:Please Just Try Htmx by adamzwasserman on Thursday December 18, 2025 @09:40PM (#46321728)
At the end of the day, personal preferences play a huge role. All programming is a compromise between tradeoffs.

React has a lot going for it. It's simply that I prefer htmx; it feels cleaner to me.

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Re:Please Just Try Htmx by arethuza on Friday December 19, 2025 @04:46AM (#46323980)
X (the Window System not the thing that was Twitter) explicitly allowed a remote machine to send rendering commands over a network to the local machine? (I'm avoiding using the term "server" as X has this round the other way - from the users perspective the server is local and the client can be remote).

Sun's NeWS also allowed something similar - but with a large amount of programmability using PostScript.

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Re:Please Just Try Htmx by IgorPartola on Friday December 19, 2025 @11:32AM (#46327657)
Sure but that was with the idea that everything happens synchronously. TeamViewer also renders the UI remotely. Any system where the client actually does any state management and not just pixel/character rendering does not use this. While the X system did allow this, real world systems did not use any of these remote rendering commands besides “render pixels”.
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Re:Please Just Try Htmx by yawaramin on Monday December 29, 2025 @02:23PM (#46424360)
> Imagine if you had a Java or Swift application and had the server sending your phone UI screens. I don’t even know how you would pitch that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/1khv43o/com...

'This technique is known as Server Driven UI and it is used by Uber, AirBnb and several other big players. The idea is to change the UI instantly without submitting a new version. Developer can just add a new entry in JSON, which can map to an existing component (already available in the binary) and then that component gets displayed on the screen.'

If you pitch to your business that you can update the app automatically without an app store submission, they will start salivating, if not foaming at the mouth.

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