January 7, 2026
Eternal snappy September
Htmx: High Power Tools for HTML
The “old-school” web trick fans keep rediscovering—faster, funnier, and stirring drama
TLDR: HTMX lets you refresh parts of a page directly from HTML, making sites feel faster without heavy frameworks. The crowd joked about its constant rediscovery while some praised it as “snappier than React,” turning a small tool into a big debate over simplicity versus complexity.
HTML just staged a comeback tour with HTMX, a tiny tool that lets buttons and links make quick background requests and swap parts of a page—no giant app framework needed. The docs promise simple, snappy interfaces using attributes like hx-post and hx-swap, and the crowd showed up with opinions. One commenter joked that a Hacker News search returns “5,194,298” hits, while another linked to the perennial rediscovery of HTMX each year (proof). Cue the meme: “Eternal HTMX September.”
Beyond the jokes, the debate got spicy: do we really need big, complex JavaScript frameworks when a 14k helper can do most of the work? A once-skeptical user now says they’re building a slick task app with HTMX and it feels “snappier than React,” the heavyweight everyone loves to argue about. HTMX’s pitch is plain: bring “hypertext” back by letting more than just forms and links talk to servers, make tiny updates without reloading, and keep complexity low. Fans dropped htmx.org links and quick-start snippets while a prankster declared, “As CEO of HTMX,” delivering corporate-speak satire that had everyone cackling. Verdict from the thread: HTMX is either a cult classic or the simple truth we keep forgetting—until next September.
Key Points
- •htmx extends HTML with attributes to access AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets, and Server Sent Events.
- •The library is lightweight (~14k min.gz’d), dependency-free, and extendable.
- •A quick start shows using hx-post and hx-swap to POST via AJAX and replace the element’s HTML with the response.
- •htmx is the successor to intercooler.js and can be installed via npm as the package “htmx.org.”
- •Development guidance includes using npm and npx serve, a structured test suite at /test/, and testing with Mocha, Chai, and Sinon.