Neither does htmx. They have said repeatedly that htmx is just an implementation, those can come and go. What's important is the concept of hypermedia and the way it enables designing web applications.
i understand people who dislike the htmx meme-driven vibe and there are certainly times when i go over the line (i'm a one man shop trying to compete w/ libraries from Facebook/Vercel & Google) but i try to be balanced about when hypermedia is and when it is not a good approach:
I don't mind memes, I often like them. One part I dislike is that you seem to say you are apart from js libraries/frameworks when you are a part of them.
Seems to me like htmx tries really hard to market as "just hypermedia" and it's not. Besides things like 'hx-ws' or 'hx-on' we've already talked about the normal cases where you need custom scripting like normal error-handling.
Just hypermedia (as both the UI and API) has been around for 3+ decades. htmx isn't that and should not claim to be that.
> you seem to say you are apart from js libraries/frameworks
Besides memes I don't see this at all. The htmx project doesn't shy away from what it is: javascript.
Hypermedia has stagnated for 2+ decades. Asserting that hypermedia cannot be more than what current implementations have delivered is stolid and myopic.
htmx represents a vision of: 1. What is the core idea of hypermedia? 2. What would hypermedia look like if the core idea was logically extended to be more useful than the original implementations? and 3. How can you use javascript to fill the gap between the html+http that we have, and this expanded idea of what hypermedia could be?
Obviously it has to do this as a javascript library because that's the only possible path. And it's great that existing web technologies are flexible enough to explore interesting ideas like this. But it's silly to discount a project because it's based on a particular vision of how to add life back to older technology.
htmx is hypermedia oriented in that, when it makes network exchanges, those are in terms of hypermedia, which differentiates it from most js libraries. Not all, there is unpoly, Hotwire, etc as well.
Sse and web sockets are extensions. Hx-on is to address the fact that standard on* attributes can only handle fixed events, but I agree it is wandering away from the core hypermedia functionality of htmx. I was on the fence on adding it, but relented when we found a good mechanism for supporting it (xpath) and some long time users expressed that they wanted to avoid needing something like alpine for the simple scripting use cases of their apps.
Htmx also fires a lot of events and I don’t make a secret of the fact that scripting is part of fieldings description of the web and perfectly acceptable in a hypermedia driven application:
