Less Htmx Is More

> Like any new tool, especially a tool that got popular as quickly as htmx, there are differing schools of thought on how best to use it. My approach—which I believe necessary to achieve the results described above—requires you to internalize something that htmx certainly hints at, but doesn’t enforce: use plain HTML wherever possible.

That’s the path for ultimate long term functional web pages!

Agreed! TLDR:

Use plain HTML wherever possible for long term functional web pages!

I have made many many web pages over the last 15 years of so that is for just a few months or days. What I do is archive it on way back machine, and if the page works on way back machine then that is my stamp of approval for the page. It can also tell you the page is self contained! It works pretty well with WebGL and event audio playlist. There is NO point of making web dev so complicated just because FANNG company are using the framework. It is designed for they corporate structure. Anyone else should NOT use FANNG based framework!

For long term web, I stay way from SPA with a long stick.

In the pursuit of ultimate long term functional web pages, how does that affect maintainability, e.g. changing requirements? In my mind, the less characters used the less effort it takes to change it, but this might be obsolete thinking wrt AI assisted (or fully written) sites.

I agree! As a journalist that codes his own site/blog, I've never took the time to learn anything more complex than good and old HTML and CSS to structure a page, and the short incursions I had in complex system (node, SCSS, frameworks), the returns for the kind of sites I developed was so little I couldn't be bothered to climb the learning curve.

HTML + CSS + sprinkles of vanilla JS is the perfect recipe for readable, fast, and high resilient web pages.

Having been out of the web dev game (or at least ‘front end’ as you cool kids are calling it? ;) for a while, I was a little dismayed when I asked an LLM for a web page that did a specific thing. It required Bootstrap and Angular and a bunch of other stuff. Asked it nicely to redo it in plain HTML and JS and the resulting code was simpler and no longer then the original, with no external dependencies.