November 3, 2025
3.0? Never heard of her
</> Htmx – The Fetch()ening
Developer skips 3.0, promises smoother sites — cheers and side‑eye
TLDR: Htmx is jumping to version 4 with a cleaner design, a modern data loader, and simpler page history. Fans praise the promise to support old versions, while skeptics gripe about JSON handling, a missing alpha download, and rivals like Datastar—turning a tech update into a comment‑section cage match.
The creator of htmx just pulled a sequel surprise: no 3.0, straight to 4.0, with a new engine under the hood using “fetch” (a modern way websites load data) and fewer hidden quirks. But the real show? The comments. One camp is thrilled that older versions will be “supported in perpetuity,” calling it rare respect for users in a world of constant breakage. Another camp is grumbling: a top gripe is that htmx still doesn’t auto‑parse JSON (structured data) after a request, something people say even old jQuery did. And everyone’s memeing the version skip—“technically correct, the best kind of correct,” joked one fan, as the crowd winked at the 3.0 that never was.
There’s also a brewing framework scuffle. A booster for Datastar swooped in, touting its tiny size, standards‑first vibe, and real‑time features like SSE (server‑sent events), hinting that the “hypermedia” future is wide open. Then a splash of cold water: someone clicked the supposed 4.0 alpha link and got a big fat 404, fueling whispers of “is this vaporware?” Meanwhile, the promise to kill brittle page‑history caching by default drew cheers for simplicity. Bottom line: htmx 4’s plan sounds cleaner and calmer—but the crowd is split between applause, punchlines, and “prove it” energy, with rivals circling and receipts demanded at the alpha link.
Key Points
- •htmx 4.0 will replace XMLHttpRequest with fetch() to simplify internals and update the events model.
- •Attribute inheritance will become explicit via a :inherited modifier, affecting how child elements receive attributes.
- •History handling will stop caching DOM snapshots and instead fetch restored content over the network.
- •An opt-in extension will offer history caching behavior similar to htmx 2.0 for those who need it.
- •Core htmx features (hx-get, hx-post, hx-target, hx-boost, hx-swap, hx-trigger) will remain largely unchanged, enabling many projects to work with minimal changes.