Well, that's the catch. If you are building marketing web _sites_, then maybe. I made my first website in 1999. But sites never entertained me much, I preferred building apps.
I've even built my first web _app_ using plain JS. It was quite painful. When jQuery came around, it was a miracle. But still, building dynamic forms with dependent fields, multi-step forms etc was quickly becoming chaotic. I was basically doing my own version of htmx, this was sth around 2006.
You could theoretically keep some semi-sane architecture with jQuery and server-generated snippets but it rarely happened in reality.
Enter Backbone. Finally some good code organization for frontend code. A bit of boilerplate, some pandemonium of events in large apps. Still fond memories and pretty solid apps.
When I first saw React I was appalled. What is this ugly XML thing with code inside? That's like php at the turn of the century. But then I've never really liked any templating language so I gave it a try and never looked back. React is going through some weird identity crisis, but I would still pick it up for any serious enterprise dynamic web app. I have high hopes for Solid, which should be React but cleaned from some historical mistakes. But for sure I am not going back to stitching some server generated snippets and quickly hitting it's limits.
I didn't forgot about server generated html. It's fine for a _lot_ of web pages. But let's not pretend that this is some universal goodness. It sucks for dynamic experiences. Htmx is not our lord saviour, it will again quickly become a mess with stringly connected bits and pieces. Just a simple form where sometimes you need to return the forms with errors or successfully update some elements elsewhere: you need to use ugly out-of-band updates. They tout Htmx being the true REST but handling 400s is shit, now you're adding some events and lo and behold, you are back where I was in 2006 with tangled ball of strings.
Well, that's the catch. If you are building marketing web _sites_, then maybe. I made my first website in 1999. But sites never entertained me much, I preferred building apps.
I've even built my first web _app_ using plain JS. It was quite painful. When jQuery came around, it was a miracle. But still, building dynamic forms with dependent fields, multi-step forms etc was quickly becoming chaotic. I was basically doing my own version of htmx, this was sth around 2006. You could theoretically keep some semi-sane architecture with jQuery and server-generated snippets but it rarely happened in reality.
Enter Backbone. Finally some good code organization for frontend code. A bit of boilerplate, some pandemonium of events in large apps. Still fond memories and pretty solid apps.
When I first saw React I was appalled. What is this ugly XML thing with code inside? That's like php at the turn of the century. But then I've never really liked any templating language so I gave it a try and never looked back. React is going through some weird identity crisis, but I would still pick it up for any serious enterprise dynamic web app. I have high hopes for Solid, which should be React but cleaned from some historical mistakes. But for sure I am not going back to stitching some server generated snippets and quickly hitting it's limits.
I didn't forgot about server generated html. It's fine for a _lot_ of web pages. But let's not pretend that this is some universal goodness. It sucks for dynamic experiences. Htmx is not our lord saviour, it will again quickly become a mess with stringly connected bits and pieces. Just a simple form where sometimes you need to return the forms with errors or successfully update some elements elsewhere: you need to use ugly out-of-band updates. They tout Htmx being the true REST but handling 400s is shit, now you're adding some events and lo and behold, you are back where I was in 2006 with tangled ball of strings.