URL-Driven State in HTMX

https://www.lorenstew.art/blog/bookmarkable-by-design-url-state-htmx/

by lorenstewart • 12 months ago

304 185 12 months ago

torstenvl• 12 months ago

Ideally, this is how state management should work all the time, regardless. Holding too much state server-side breaks bookmarks and shares.

EDIT: Hmm. Is this comment controversial? Obviously some people disagree strongly. Mind sharing why?

patates2• 12 months ago

didn't down-vote you but perhaps you mean tech which holds nearly all client state on the server like JSF or webforms and I think that may be not so clear to some :)

for front-end frameworks, not storing the state on the URL usually means storing it on the memory or sessionstorage and server is usually not involved

cadamsdotcom• 12 months ago

This pattern - saving the query to the URL with the history API - is fantastic UX but never gets implemented because there’s never time. Luckily an LLM can build this quickly as it’s straightforward and mostly boilerplate.

Still the boilerplate makes me wonder if it belongs in a library, eg. a React hook that’s a drop in replacement for `useState`. Backend logic would still need to be implemented. Does something like this exist?

monadoid• 12 months ago

Agreed I love this pattern! I'm a big fan of using nuqs for this in nextjs, but really stoked to try out rust / loco / htmx for my next project.

PaulHoule3• 12 months ago

Doesn't react-router do something like this?

nosefurhairdo2• 12 months ago

Yep, `useSearchParams()`. At work I built a wrapper to incorporate zod schemas for typesafe search param state. Nuqs is the best for this if your application meets its prerequisites: https://nuqs.47ng.com/

t-writescode• 12 months ago

is fantastic UX but never gets implemented because there’s never time

Wouldn't the change take something like an hour the first time you implement it and then 10s of seconds for calling the centralized function henceforth?

I don't think the problem is "there's never time"; and if that is the problem, I don't think an LLM will "solve" that, especially since studies have shown developers are slower when they use LLMs to code for them.

crab_galaxy• 12 months ago

never gets implemented because there’s never time

In my experience that time is saved and more when you find you no longer need to manage Zustand/redux stores to track application state. This pattern works beautifully when incorporating the query parameters as query keys with tan stack query too.

c-hendricks• 12 months ago

At work we have a hook for that with various backends (memory, local storage, redux, and search params). Supports page, offset, and cursor pagination.

https://stackblitz.com/edit/github-8ssor8-rqkyew8w?file=src%...

franky472• 12 months ago

Still the boilerplate makes me wonder if it belongs in a library, eg. a React hook that’s a drop in replacement for `useState`

That’s exactly what `nuqs` does (disclaimer: I’m the author).

Backend logic would still need to be implemented

Assuming your backend is written in TypeScript, you can use nuqs loaders to reuse the same validation logic on both sides.

https://nuqs.47ng.com

rorylaitila3• 12 months ago

I didn't see if you were doing this, but there is an additional use case that I had when using hot swapping like HTMX: updating other links on the page to reflect the URL state, when those links are outside of the swapped content.

While the server can use the URLs to update the links in the new HTML, if other links outside that content should also reflect the changes params, you need to manually update them.

In my progressive enhancement library I call this 'sync-params' https://github.com/roryl/zsx?tab=readme-ov-file#synchronize-...

trentnix3• 12 months ago

Isn’t that what hx-swap-oob is for?

rorylaitila3• 12 months ago

Maybe, I'm not an HTMX user, but looking at hx-swap-oob I think that solves another issue. My need was when other links can exist in any place, and they need to match the URL after its clicked. I didn't want to have the performance hit or remember to add extra swaps just to get links up to date. The feature basically is "when a param is marked to be synced, ensure all links on the page are updated to match the changed param"

ashwinsundar4• 12 months ago

You don't need to do anything different to the other URLs on the page, by default all parameters are passed along in every request, so you just need to retrieve any expected url parameters in the server code

https://htmx.org/attributes/hx-params/

o11c• 12 months ago

Note that you can store longer state (at least 64K; more not tested) in the fragment (`location.hash`); obviously only the client gets to see this, but it's better than nothing (and JS can send it to the server if really needed).

For parameters the server does need to see, remember that params need not be &-separated kv pairs, it can be arbitrary text. Keys can usually be eliminated and just hard-coded in the web page; this may make short params longer but likely makes long ones shorter.

You absolutely should not restore state based on LocalStorage; that breaks the whole advantage of doing this properly! If I wanted previous state, I would've navigated my history thereto. I hope this isn't as bad as sites that break with multiple open tabs at least ...

NegativeLatency2• 12 months ago

I've seem a largish company everyone here knows of, try this and have it fail, because of various weird client things, and also eventually run out of space in the hash. It's a neat hack but I wouldn't rely on it.

wredcoll• 12 months ago

Oh boy, hashbangs are back.

The first one that comes to mind was twitter...

ashwinsundar4• 12 months ago

They failed as a company?

mrits• 12 months ago

When people start using or buying your software you are going to quickly find out that 64K won't work

actionfromafar• 12 months ago

640K oughta be enough for everyone.

PaulHoule3• 12 months ago

This is a classic pattern of web applications from the 1990s. Works amazingly well even w/o HTMX

nosefurhairdo2• 12 months ago

One of the legitimate grievances of SPAs is that they made this pattern less obvious.

PaulHoule3• 12 months ago

I find the whole thing where you configure your web server to serve the same thing from

  http://example.com/application

and

  http://example.com/application/with/path?and=parameters

to be absolutely nerve-wracking. Not hard to do but it's just batshit crazy and breaks the whole idea of how web crawlers are supposed to work. On the other hand, we had trouble with people (who we know want to crawl us specifically) crawling a site where you visit

   http://example.com/item/448828

and it loads an SPA which in turn fetches a well-structured JSON documents like

   http://api.example.com/item/448827
   http://api.example.com/item/448828
   http://api.example.com/item/448829

with no cache so it downloads megabytes of HTML, Javascript, Images and who knows what -- and if they want to deal with the content in a structured way and it put it in a database it's already in the exact format they want. But I guess it's easier to stand up a Rube Goldberg machine and write parsers when you could look at our site in the developers tools and figure out how it works in five minutes... and just load those JSON documents into a document database and be querying right out of the gate.

pjmlp3• 12 months ago

More like we have a whole generation educated in bootcamps that think they need SPAs for doing anything.

fny3• 12 months ago

Coming up next: moving JS outside of markup with selectors.

Twey3• 12 months ago

The example URL here, though, is still not (helpfully) bookmarkable because the contents of page 2 will change as new items are added. To get truly bookmarkable list URLs, the best approach I've seen is ‘page starting from item X’, where X is an effectively-unique ID for the item (e.g. a primary key, or a timestamp to avoid exposing IDs).

wackget• 12 months ago

Dunno why you've been voted down; you're totally right. The method you mention is called token/cursor/keyset-based pagination.

nebezb• 12 months ago

He’s being downvoted because suggesting cursor pagination in an example describing sorting by price (descending) is plainly wrong. While neither is bookmarkable, cursor pagination is much worse. The UX went from “show me _almost_ the most expensive items” to “show me everything less expensive than the last item on the page I was on previously — which may be stocked out, more expensive, or heavily discounted today”. The latter isn’t something you’d bookmark.

bubblyworld• 12 months ago

Yeah, solving this edge case properly can add a lot of complexity (your solution has the same problem, no? deletes would mess it up as would updates, technically). I've seen people using long-lived "idempotency tokens" point to an event log for this but it's a bit nuts. Definitely worth considering not solving it, which might be a more intuitive UX anyway (e.g. for leaderboards).

yxhuvud• 12 months ago

It doesn't have the problem if a timestamp or similar is used.

crabmusket• 12 months ago

Datomic + put the database version in the URL :)

runeks2• 12 months ago

The example URL here, though, is still not (helpfully) bookmarkable because the contents of page 2 will change as new items are added.

Why is the content changing between refreshes not "(helpfully) bookmarkable"?

The HN front page (ie. "page 1") does that but it's a very useful bookmark.

high_na_euv• 12 months ago

Indeed, thats weird.

He probably wants to freeze the state of the page. Maybe he should consider saving it via ctrl s

Twey3• 12 months ago

The data in a bookmark may change, but it should preserve some property of interest — otherwise why bookmark it?

Page 1 (a.k.a. the top few results with no pagination) has the property of being the selected top of HN, which is an interesting property in its own right, and what we're bookmarking. Page 2 doesn't have that property.

purerandomness• 12 months ago

If you're bookmarking a directory, a list of things (e.g. the HN frontpage), you expect the content to change when opening the bookmark.

You bookmark a link to the directory so you don't forget the directory's entry URL.

The use case the author is talking about is a different one: You are configuring a complex item in a shop, and want to bookmark the URL so you can save it, recall it later, share this configuration with someone, or compare it with a different URL.

In this case, you also would expect little details to change (pricing, descriptions, photos) but the structure of the state should stay the same.

It's very frustrating when you share a link to a product detail page, only to discover that all your filters and configurations have been lost.

waynenilsen• 12 months ago

also significantly better for performance

cloudking• 12 months ago

I like the simplicity. I've been building some web apps with Alpine.js recently, another lightweight React alternative. It's pretty powerful and capable for building reactive SPAs, only ~16kb.

https://alpinejs.dev/

https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine

aitchnyu2• 12 months ago

There is Alpine Ajax, their HTMX counterpart.

https://alpine-ajax.js.org/

Arch-TK• 12 months ago

Next you'll tell me the URL can contain information which can be used to auto-scroll you to a specific heading.

aaronbrethorst• 12 months ago

Sorcery!

johnisgood6• 12 months ago

Not even only that, but it can auto-scroll to ANY parts these days, see: "URL Text Fragments".

https://www.lexo.ch/blog/2025/01/highlight-text-on-page-and-...

In any case, yeah, what was suggested in the submission is nothing esoteric, but I guess everything can be new to someone.

Gilipe• 12 months ago

Our dealership listings page is largely run with this pattern, as well as most of our plugins. Nothing new and very dependable. Forgo HTMX for one less dependency.

_heimdall• 12 months ago

This is a great pattern to follow, and I highly recommend understanding it even to those working on projects that are full client-side SPAs.

Its too easy to jump right in to react, NextJS, etc. Learning why URLs work the way they work is still extremely useful. Eventually you will want to support deep linking, and when you do the URL suddenly becomes really important.

Remix has also been really interesting on this front. They leaned heavily into web standards, including URLs as a way of managing state.

DimmieMan2• 12 months ago

The JS world leaves me more and more perplexed.There's a similar rant about forms, but why is this so hard? Huge amount of dev time spent being able to execute asynchronous functions to the backend seamlessly yet pretty much every major framework is just rawdog the url string and deal with URLSearchParams object yourself.

Tanstack router[1] provides first class support for not only parsing params but giving you a typed URL helper, this should be the goal for the big meta frameworks but even tools like sveltekit that advertise themselves on simplicity and web standards have next to zero support.

I've seen even non JS frameworks, with like fifteen lines of documentation for half baked support of search params.

The industry would probably be better off if even a tenth of the effort that goes into doing literally anything to avoid learning the platform was spent making this (and post-redirect-get for forms) the path of least resistance for the 90% of the time search params are perfectly adequate.

I don't use HTMX but i do love how it and its community are pushing the rediscover of how much simpler things can be.

[1] https://tanstack.com/router/latest/docs/framework/react/guid...

switz• 12 months ago

Nuqs[0] does a very good job at parsing and managing search params. It's a complex issue that involves serialization and deserialization, as well as throttling URL updates. It's a wonderful library. I agree, though, that it would be nice to see more native framework support for this.

Forms are also hard because they involve many different data-types, client-side state, (client?) and server validation, crossing the network boundary, contextual UI, and so on. These are not simple issues, no matter how much the average developer would love them to be. It's time we accept the problem domain as complex.

I will say that React Server Components are a huge step towards giving power back to the URL, while also allowing developers to access the full power of both the client and the server–but the community at large has deemed the mental model too complex. Notably, it enables you to build nuanced forms that work with or without javascript enabled, and handle crossing the boundary rather gracefully. After working with RSCs for several years now, I can't imagine going back. I've written several blog posts about them[1][2] and feel the community should invest more time into understanding their ideas.

I have a post in my drafts about how taking advantage of URL params properly (with or without RSCs) give our UIs object permanence. How we as web developers should be relying on them more and using it to reflect "client-side" state. Not always, but more often. But it's a hard post to finish as communicating and crystalizing these ideas are difficult. One day I'll get it out.

[0] https://nuqs.47ng.com

[1] https://saewitz.com/server-components-give-you-optionality

[2] https://saewitz.com/the-mental-model-of-server-components

DimmieMan2• 12 months ago

Don’t get me wrong, I never meant it was easy to solve, just that things could be better if search parameters didn’t somehow become this niche legacy thing with minimal appetite to fix.

Thanks for the point on RSC, probably the first argument I’ve heard that helps me contextualise why this extreme paradigm shift and tooling complexity is being pushed as the default.

throwaway54365• 12 months ago

I prefer how Angular handles it. It's just HTML with bindings to an object

valenterry3• 12 months ago

Tanstack router[1] provides first class support for not only parsing params but giving you a typed URL helper, this should be the goal for the big meta frameworks

Let's not pretend that the Tanstack solution would be good. For example, What if my form changes and a new field is added but someone still runs the old html/js and sends their form from the old code? Does Tanstack have any support to 1.) detect that situation 2.) analyze / monitor / log it (for easy debugging), 3.) automatically resolve it (if possible) and 4.) allow custom handling where automatic resolution isn't possible?

It doesn't look like it from the documentation.

Sorry, frustration is causing me to rant here, but it's a classical thing of the frontend-world and it causes so much frustration. In the backend-world, many (maybe even most) libraries/frameworks/protocols have builtin support for that. See graphql with it's default values and deprecation at least, see avro or protobuff with their support for versions, schema-history and even automatic migration.

When will I not have to deal with that by hand in my frontend-code anymore?

fny3• 12 months ago

The same thing should happen that happens with Rails/Django and friends: nothing. Most frameworks only parse URL params, they don't check to see if the params are valid given your app logic.

That's your job. Frankly, anything more would be over kill. Why should my url param manager handle new or removed form fields?

AdieuToLogic• 12 months ago

On a related note, I've found combining htmx with Parsley[0] to be very powerful for adding client-side validation to declarative server-rendered HTML form definitions. All that is needed is a simple htmx extension[1] and applicable data attribute use.

0 - https://parsleyjs.org/doc/index.html

1 - https://htmx.org/docs/#extensions

btown• 12 months ago

treating URL parameters as your single source of truth... a URL like /?status=active&sortField=price&sortDir=desc&page=2 tells you everything about the current view

Hard disagree that there can be a single source of truth. There are (at least) 3 levels of state for parameter control, and I don't like when libraries think they can gloss over the differences or remove this nuance from the developer:

- The "in-progress" state of the UI widgets that someone is editing (from radio buttons to characters typed in a search box)

- The "committed" state that indicates the snapshot of those parameters that is actively desired to be loaded from the server; this may be debounced, or triggered by a Search button

- The "loaded" state that indicates what was most recently loaded from the server, and which (most likely) drives the data visualized in the non-parameter-controlling parts of the UI

What if someone types in a search bar but then hits "next page" - do we forget what they typed? What happens if you've just committed changes to your parameters, but data subsequently loaded from a prior commit? Do changes fire in sequence? Should they cancel prior requests or ignore their results? What happens if someone clicks a back button while requests are inflight, or while someone's typed uncommitted values into a pre-committed search bar? How do you visualize the loaded parameters as distinct from the in-progress parameters? What if some queries take orders of magnitude longer than others, and you want to provide guidance about this?

All of those questions and more will vary between applications. One size does not fit all.

If this comment resonates with you, choose and advocate for tooling that gives you the expressivity you feel in your gut that you'll need. Especially in a world of LLMs, terse syntax and implicit state management may not be worth losing that expressivity.

delifue• 12 months ago

Yes the simple solution is obviously not perfect in edge cases. It's a tradeoff between simplicity and edge-case-perfectness.

In my opinion the higher priority task is to optimize the query in backend so that it can refresh quickly. If loading is quick enough then that edge case will be less likely to happen.

chii2• 12 months ago

All of those questions and more will vary between applications. One size does not fit all.

all of those come from the fundamental "requirement" set out earlier to have no in-page state, but still require the webpage to behave as tho it did.

If you remove this requirement, then it will be like how it was back in the 2000's era web pages! And the url does indeed contain the single source of truth - there are no inflight requests that are not also a full page reloads.

tempfile• 12 months ago

The example they used for "in progress" state was form inputs. Don't you count those as in-page state?

vyrotek• 12 months ago

The syncing of the state reminded me a lot of datastar Signals. And a little bit of ASP.NET ViewState.

https://data-star.dev/guide/reactive_signals

ashwinsundar4• 12 months ago

Makes sense, HTMX and Datastar both have a common philosophical ancestor in HATEOAS

emmelaich• 12 months ago

Another reminder of Programming inside the URL String. https://apenwarr.ca/log/20121218

TimTheTinker7• 12 months ago

I had a similar strategy when building early web apps with jQuery and ExtJS (but using the URL hash before the History API was available). Just read from location.hash during page load and write to it when the form state changes.

For more complex state (like table layout), I used to save it as a JSON object, then compress and base64 encode it, and stick it in the URL hash. Gave my users a bookmarklet that would create a shortened URL (like https://example.com/url/1afe9) from my server if they needed to share it.

sghiassy• 12 months ago

It’s still unfortunately contentious in many development circles :/

kazinator• 12 months ago

URL-driven state? Sounds like a "take that" upper cut to the jaw of the RESTful opponent.

bravesoul22• 12 months ago

Please do! Dropping deep links with state is very useful.

It cant be used for everything. E.g. not dark mode!

aitchnyu2• 12 months ago

My HTMX side project uses Rison to store nested objects without unreadable encoding or handmade parsing.

https://github.com/Nanonid/rison

podgorniy• 12 months ago

I think people are now ready for php. I bet it will be reinvented on top of nodejs.

edu• 12 months ago

I think they go with a PHP implementation on WASM so it runs on the client

mhd• 12 months ago

I'm voting for Cold Fusion on top of Golang.

pjmlp3• 12 months ago

Too advanced typesystem for Go folks, better keep it on top of Java. /s

inopinatus• 12 months ago

It’s about time. We already reinvented Lotus Notes.

tonyedgecombe4• 12 months ago

Lotus Notes was great until they added email.

Etheryte• 12 months ago

Given you can run Doom on your fridge these days, it should be absolutely no surprise that you can already run PHP both in the browser and in Node [0].

[0] https://github.com/asmblah/uniter

bob10293• 12 months ago

At some point I hope it becomes obvious that well-engineered SSR webapps on a modern internet connection are indistinguishable from a purely client side experience. We used this exact same technology over dialup modems and it worked well enough to get us to this point.

Being able to click a button and experience 0ms navigation is not something any customer has ever brought to my attention. It also doesn't help much in the more meaningful domains of business since you can't cheat god (information theory). If the data is so frequently out of sync that every interaction results in JSON payloads being exchanged, then why not just render the whole thing on the server in one go? This is where I can easily throw the latency arguments back in the complexity merchant's face - you've simply swept the synchronization problem under a rug to be dealt with later.

worldsayshi2• 12 months ago

What about a feature like query completion?

zarzavat• 12 months ago

modern internet connection

Have you heard of these things called smartphones? I hear they're getting quite popular.

lelanthran• 12 months ago

At some point I hope it becomes obvious that well-engineered SSR webapps on a modern internet connection are indistinguishable from a purely client side experience.

I dunno; other than the fact that there are some webapps that really are better done mostly client-side with routine JSON hydration (webmail, for example, or maps), my recent experimentation with making the backend serve only static files (html, css, etc) and dynamic data (JSON) turned out a lot better than a backend that generates HTML pages using templates.

Especially when I want to add MCP capabilities to a system, it becomes almost trivial in my framework, because the backend endpoints that serve dynamic data serve all the dynamic data as JSON. The backend really is nicer to work with than one that generates HTML.

I'm sure in a lot of cases, it's the f/end frameworks that leave a bad taste in your mouth, and truth be told, I don't really have an answer for that other than looking into creating a framework for front-end to replace the spaghetti-pattern that most front-ends have.

I'm not even sure if it is possible to have non-spaghetti logic in the front-end anymore - surely a framework that did that would have been adopted en-masse by now?

0x4454422• 12 months ago

Complexity merchant... I like that.

swiftcoder• 12 months ago

Being able to click a button and experience 0ms navigation is not something any customer has ever brought to my attention

With modern CSS transitions, you can mostly fake this anyway. It's not like javascript apps actually achieve 0ms in practice - their main advantage is that they don't (always) cause layout/content flashes as things update

ebiester4• 12 months ago

Yes, a well-engineered SSR webapp could be indistinguishable from an SPA. However, it is much harder to build a well engineered SSR with the tools we have. I haven't seen someone solve errors with form submissions and the back button well at the framework level. Post-Redirect-Get was awful. Trying to solve back buttons and wizards. Trying to solve modals. Is a modal a separate page with the rest in the back? What does closing a modal mean? What does a sidebar mean? How about closing it? Pretty soon, you're in half-an-SPA already.

And since you don't want a 2000 character URL, you're either storing half of the session on the server or having to build an abstraction with local storage. And since our frameworks didn't evolve to handle that, what is the purpose?

The key insight into the SPA is that you are writing a coherent client experience. No SSR framework figured out how to do this because they thought about pages rather than experiences.

Let me be clear: I am speaking about web applications. If you're providing information and only have a small number of customer interactions, an SSR is superior. CNN should not be an SPA.

RNCTX• 12 months ago

Being able to click a button and experience 0ms navigation is not something any customer has ever brought to my attention.

"it's too slow" is a thing a lot of customers have mentioned to me over the years.

bblb• 12 months ago

Glad I skipped the whole "JavaScript only" webdev phase. My mad PostNuke skills are relevant again.

franky472• 12 months ago

Indeed, the Platformatic folks announced just that last week:

https://blog.platformatic.dev/laravel-nodejs-php-in-watt-run...

donatj• 12 months ago

As a long time PHP developer, it never fails to amuse (amaze?) me the lengths people go to in order to get the things the browser will give you for free.

jiggawatts2• 12 months ago

The most "special" code that I regularly come across is when a developer takes a JPG in blob storage -- already a public HTTPS URL -- then serves that in a "Web API" that converts it to base-64 encoded bytes inside JSON, sends it to client JavaScript, decodes it, and feeds it to an image in code.

Invariably, it's done with full buffering of the blob bytes in memory on both server and client, no streaming.

Bonus points are awarded for the use of TypeScript, compression (of already compressed JPGs, of course), and extensive unit and integration tests to try and iron out the bugs.

cnnlive789• 12 months ago

php is great but I’m surprised by how people are not discussing htmx.

It’s a chance to start all over yet again! Come on- we’re all up for that, we do it every few months!

chuckadams3• 12 months ago

The browser gives you a full-blown programming language with a rich API, but it seems a lot of people avoid that in favor of smushing together a static view on the server side with little more than string interpolation.

mardifoufs• 12 months ago

Like a super rich and very well tested front end client, that doesn't need a server to template everything for it?

tonyedgecombe4• 12 months ago

I'd love to see a modern PHP without all the warts but with the ease of use.

johnisgood6• 12 months ago

I think you are in for a treat, then, because PHP 8 is way different from PHP 5.

ccanassa• 12 months ago

That’s called Python or Ruby.

I’ve been building web apps since the ’90s, and I never understood the appeal of PHP. It was always a terrible language, and there were usually better alternatives available.

pjmlp3• 12 months ago

I feel revindicated for staying with ASP.NET and JavaEE/Spring all these years.

Next.js is kind of bareable, as it uses the same approach, going back to the roots of web development, it is almost as doing JSPs all over again.

jermaustin1• 12 months ago

I actually started my own PHP based on C# called CHP for fun.

It runs atop whatever the current dotnet hosting service is (Kestrel?). It takes everything inside the "<? ?>" code blocks and inlines it into one big Main method, exposing a handful of shared public convenience methods (mostly around database access and easy cookie-based authentication), as well as the request and response objects.

Each request is JITed, then the assembly is cached in memory for future requests to the same path, and it will recompile sources that are newer than the cached assembly.

There is no routing other than dropping the .chp extension if you pass "-ne" into the arguments launching the server.

It's not very far along, and is completely pointless other than for the sake of building my own web language thingy for the first time since 2003.

bob10293• 12 months ago

Have you looked into the string interpolation & verbatim operators as a templating alternative? These can be combined to create complex, nested strings:

  var reportPartial = @$"
    <h1>{report.Name}</h1>
    <table>
      {string.Join('\n', report.Items.Select(reportItem => @$"
        <tr>
          <td>{reportItem.Col1}</td>
          <td>{reportItem.Col2}</td>
        </tr>
      "))}
    </table>
  ";

In more complex views or reuse scenarios, I'd push the inner interpolation loop to a method.

This is how I've been building my .NET web apps for the last ~3 years. @+$ = PHP in C# as far as I'm concerned.

qudat• 12 months ago

It’s called nextjs

colgandev2• 12 months ago

It has been wild to realize I've now seen one full technology cycle of thin client to thick client to thin client again. Maybe PHP this time around will be able to be more robust with the lessons learned.

labrador• 12 months ago

program like it's 1999

justsayinnnn• 12 months ago

Finally we are getting out of Hipster tech territory and back to something that makes sense. Thank you HTMX.

fny3• 12 months ago

Putting JavaScript directly in your markup with bespoke attributes is extremely hipster.

robertoandred2• 12 months ago

JS has always been able to work with URLs. Thinking it can't and HTMX is some sort of savior is the real hipster territory.

junto• 12 months ago

I find it deeply ironic that we have come full circle, and Javascripters have reinvented what we had 20 years ago.

lexicality• 12 months ago

I'm not sure that it really counts as ironic when HTMX was conceived specifically to try and get people to stop writing megabytes of JS and to go back to the old ways.

tomtomistaken• 12 months ago

We were experimenting with saving states in URLs with https://libmap.org. Sharing these URLs on mastodon.social would add the post to the map.

ac130kz• 12 months ago

URLs up to ~2000 characters

Exactly, this approach doesn't scale well without trickery involved. You have to have some sort of weird encoding in place to compact it down.

rbinv• 12 months ago

Yup, ASP's "__VIEWSTATE" hidden form parameter comes to mind. It was base64-encoded and POSTed because it could get loooong (hundreds of KB).

Terrible for browser navigation/refresh though, because pretty much everything was a form POST. Thus no URL state sharing, either.

bux93• 12 months ago

Also a terrible idea to execute code from the client, even if it's supposedly signed.

https://darkatlas.io/blog/critical-sharepoint-vulnerability-...

gloosx2• 12 months ago

It's just how web works – storing data in URL params to restore the same state later. With React or whatever library you do the exactly same thing. In this case HTMX doesn't particularly stand out or enable anything new here.

runeks2• 12 months ago

With React or whatever library you do the exactly same thing.

There are many React SPAs where the address bar URL rarely changes, and I have to find some "share" button on the page itself to get the page's URL.

gloosx2• 12 months ago

This is a generalization from personal exposure, availability bias. It just points out that some people implement things poorly — ignoring that many well-designed SPAs do use URL state effectively. React itself does not prevent or discourage URL-based state, it's just the developer's choice whether to use routing or no.

hamdouni• 12 months ago

Funny to see query parameters used as intended ... few decades ago

jarofgreen• 12 months ago

SEO is built in since search engines can crawl every state combination.

This isn't always a plus - bots can find a very large number of pages to crawl and swamp your server with traffic. Maybe they would get stuck on all the combinations of listing page filters and miss the important pages.

Not saying the conclusion is wrong - just something to consider.

Chiron1991• 12 months ago

That's why you can give guidance to crawlers using sitemaps.

Quarrel• 12 months ago

Which, just like robots.txt, worked decently well until the AI bot crawlers overwhelmed all else.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 12 months ago

all the combinations of listing page filters

A public-facing page at $DAYJOB has 44 boolean filters for a bunch of different hardware components (think screws and fasteners rather than boards and drives), meaning 2^44 different combinations ~= 17 trillion different pages to crawl (from the disrespectful AI crawler's perspective).

That said, it wasn't really an issue except we had a misconfiguration in the in-memory caching database we were using so it didn't delete old stuff from memory and started writing to disk, which meant that we ran out of our (millions of) file inodes on the production server. Just saying to point out that keeping the state in the URL wasn't the problem in this case, and it is generally not a problem; it can be a problem but, when it is, it will be obvious why.

theanonymousone• 12 months ago

I'm currently writing a single-file web application in "Java" using JBang, J2Html, and Javalin (+htmx).

It's so refreshing!

user____name• 12 months ago

This is cute but merely points to the obvious solution of base64 encoding all page contents straight into the URL.

0x4454422• 12 months ago

The bookmarkable ability is secondary to the filter parameters meaning. Once I know the parameters and their meaning I dont need the bookmark. In fact, I'd probably need to title the bookmark as something close to the URL anyway to know what it was actually referring to.

gortok• 12 months ago

So until about 2013? 2014? URL-driven state was just the way everything worked.

One of the major complaints of `cgi-bin` was that you had to manually add back to the URL to manage state (and of that time, there were a good number of cgi-bin applications that just didn't bother -- which unsurprisingly is how the SPAs worked at first until "URL Routing" took over).

But, all of this is literally just reinventing the wheel that's been there since the web began. The entire purpose of the web was to be able to link to a specific resource, action, or state without having to to anything other than share a URL.

What's wild is there are whole generations of programmers that started programming after the SPA world debuted and are now re-learning things that "were just the way things were" before 2013.

packetlost• 12 months ago

tbh I always found it interesting that CGI was dropped as a well supported technology from languages like Python. It was incredibly simple to implement and reason about (provided you actually understand HTTP, maybe that's the issue), and scaled well beyond what most internal enterprise apps I was working on at the time needed.

teddyh• 12 months ago

I remember that before cookies were widely implemented in web browsers, the Spinner web server (effectively an early web server and development framework in one process) implemented what it called ”prestate”; a parenthesised portion of the URL, part of the path, but before the actual path. Like this: http://example.com/(tables,images)/developers/

robertoandred2• 12 months ago

When you move from React to HTMX, you trade complex state management for server-side simplicity.

Managing the same state will have the same complexity on the server as it does on the client. HTMX's smugness is a huge turnoff.

recursivedoubts2• 12 months ago

depends how much state is accidental vs essential:

https://htmx.org/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port/

while I certainly try to be funny online, I hope I'm reasonably even handed about the tradeoffs associated with the hypermedia approach:

https://htmx.org/essays/when-to-use-hypermedia/

https://htmx.org/essays/#on-the-other-hand

colgandev2• 12 months ago

HTMX has given me so much joy. I love Django and was there near the beginning. For a while I thought I had to switch to something like FastAPI and Vue etc to make relevant web apps and sites, but with Django recently adding async, Django Ninja, and HTMX, I'd reach for Django now for almost anything besides a few specific use cases.

So many problems I've run into with newer tools feel like they were already solved years ago if you can SSR.

Not that the newer tools don't have their place and they have plenty of good ideas, but it's been fun to see Django stay relevant and for more of the included batteries to be useful again (forms, templates, etc).

URL-Driven State in HTMX

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