htmx 1.0.0 has been released!
htmx 1.0.0 Release I’m happy to announce the 1.0.0 release (https://unpkg.com/browse/htmx.org@1.0.0/) of htmx.
htmx is now mature enough that I can recommend it as a general replacement for intercooler.js projects. I don’t think there is a strong reason to port an existing intercooler project to htmx. I have several large intercooler apps and will not be moving them over any time soon. I can, however, recommend using htmx over intercooler for new projects.
htmx is a different sort of javascript library. It is an HTML & hypertext-oriented reply to the current dominance of javascript-based SPA libraries. It is a response to Tom MacWright’s question: “If not SPAs, What?” (https://macwright.com/2020/10/28/if-not-spas.html).
As the homepage says (https://htmx.org/):
• Why should only and
• Why should only click & submit events trigger them?
• Why should only GET & POST be available?
• Why should you only be able to replace the entire screen?
HTML-oriented web development was abandoned not because hypertext was a bad idea, but rather because HTML didn’t have sufficient expressive power. htmx aims to fix that & allows you to implement many common modern web UI patterns (https://htmx.org/examples/) using the original hypertext model of the web.
History & Thanks htmx began life as intercooler.js (https://intercoolerjs.org) back in 2013 (https://github.com/bigskysoftware/intercooler-js/commit/62d3dbdb5c056ee866aba3575e148de649fc3efe).
In april (https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/commit/e38dea64dd1065003a0e833d7b469d24e6bc2919) of this year I began work on a jQuery-independent & improved version of intercoolerjs, renamed to htmx. I chose to rename the library because, in working on intercooler, I had come to appreciate that intercooler & htmx were completing HTML as a hypertext rather than just some funky, idiosyncratic javascript libraries.
In May (https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/releases/tag/v0.0.1) htmx reached 0.0.1. Soon thereafter I had the good fortune of being contacted by Ben Croker (https://twitter.com/ben_pylo) who was interested in htmx as a base for his new reactive library, Sprig (https://putyourlightson.com/plugins/sprig). Ben was willing to be an early adopter of htmx and pushed the library along much faster than it would have gone otherwise.
I have been very lucky to the have help and feedback from many contributors in GitHub (https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/graphs/contributors) and on Discord (https://htmx.org/discord). I’d like to thank, in particular, Ben Pate (https://github.com/benpate), Robert Schroll (https://github.com/rschroll) & Alejandro Schmeichler (https://github.com/jreviews) for contributing code as well as new ideas and discussions.
I would like to thank Devmode.fm (https://devmode.fm/) for having me on to talk about htmx (https://devmode.fm/episodes/dynamic-html-with-htmx) and for cleaning up all my “uhhs” and “umms”.
Finally, I would like to thank Justin Sampson (https://github.com/jsampson), who took a lot of time to explain REST & HATEOAS to me and how intercooler (and now htmx) fit into that model for web development.
Changes
• I bumped the version number :)
Enjoy!