December 18, 2025
Dev church vs htmx cult
Please Just Try Htmx
Dev world split as simple web tool sparks a mini holy war over how to build websites
TLDR: A passionate article begged developers to use a simpler tool called htmx instead of heavy frameworks, claiming most sites don’t need all that complexity. The comments exploded into a mini culture war, with jokers, skeptics, and burned ex-users arguing over hype, messier code, and whether anyone needs yet another “better” way to build the web.
A writer begged developers to “please just try htmx,” a small tool that lets websites be interactive without dragging in giant code piles like React, and the internet did what it does best: turned it into a feelings war. The article pitches htmx as the chill middle ground between old-school web pages and huge JavaScript frameworks, basically saying, “You’re not building Google Docs, calm down.” But the crowd was not calm.
One commenter instantly set the tone with pure chaos energy: “I did not read the page. Can you tell me where stars live?” — skipping the tech talk entirely and turning the thread into accidental absurdist comedy. Another didn’t care about htmx at all and just begged the author to install a security certificate so people could actually open the site, proving once again that the real boss fight is always basic website setup.
Then came the real drama. philipwhiuk blasted the whole “convert to my framework” vibe, comparing it to religious preaching and reminding everyone that ancient tech like jQuery still quietly runs the web. asim jumped in with a heartbreak story: they did try htmx, felt it “polluted” their code, and are now crawling back to simpler tools. Finally, catapart slammed the door completely, calling htmx basically unnecessary now and siding with newer browser features. In short: one tiny library, three camps—true believers, burned exes, and “absolutely not” skeptics—fighting it out in the comments.
Key Points
- •The article proposes HTMX as a middle ground between plain HTML and client-side frameworks for adding interactivity without writing JavaScript.
- •HTMX enables HTML elements to make HTTP requests and swap server-returned HTML fragments into the page via attributes like hx-post and hx-swap.
- •The library is approximately 14kb gzipped, avoiding large dependency trees and complex build setups.
- •Live demos illustrate features such as a debounced live search implemented through HTMX with behavior declared in markup (“Locality of Behavior”).
- •A case study reports Contexte migrated from React to Django templates with HTMX, cutting roughly two-thirds of the codebase, with a caveat that results depend on app type.