I remember someone on HN puts it really well. There is a whole generation of developers that thinks frontend = React. And more importantly they are in much larger number than those of us who went through DHTML and Ajax.

We are now the minority, and they are the norm.

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prisenco 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not just developers, but designers. Finding designers who understand hypermedia in that way is nearly impossible.

A team that decides to shift towards this approach to development has to get buy-in from the designers as well. It's not just the devs who have to retrain.

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masfoobar 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Not just developers, but designers. Finding designers who understand hypermedia in that way is nearly impossible.

This is true. 100%

The difference for me and my AppDev career history is -- I never worked with a team of dedicated frontend developers. We are primarily backend developers who are frontend devs as well (though we can admit it is secondary to our backend skills)

Personally, the change for us was placing our html on the server side. So, to me, styling is not a problem and easy to test. It should be, with some training, easy for a dedicated frontend developer to jump in as well... though we might have to shuffle things around with their tools, to gel nicely with the backend team.

If anything, I think this transition would keep the two departments closer together - communication is needed especially for htmx webapps.

I think it can be difficult to win over other backend developers with htmx, as my original post suggests. Adding a frontend layer as well... it is unlikely htmx will be taken seriously when the majority want to stick with what they know.

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prisenco 2 days ago | parent [-]

It's best to not sell it as using HTMX the way you would sell using React as a framework. Instead, I say "let the web be the web."

Building things using standards and not fighting the paradigm with a new paradigm. What's great about HTMX is that it fits alongside the standards in a way that SPA frameworks generally don't.

But focusing on the web itself and everything it's capable of without a framework means you can easily move off of HTMX if need be.

	▲	masfoobar 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		"let the web be the web." 100%

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darqis 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You're acting as if "hypermedia" was some kind of standard everyone should know. It is not.

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masfoobar 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is hard to know our future. What I am about to write could be wrong, but I will try...

At a basic level - it is all html, css, javascript and a server side language at the end of the day. Whether we are talking today or back in the early 00's.

For few years now, we add nodejs, typescript, React, etc.. on top of it. Personally, while I understand the purpose of using such tools for complicated web development, I still believe good websites can be created without them. It keeps is simple, small in size, etc.

Of course, a few years before that the push was angular or knockoutjs. Before that the push was jQuery, etc.

For the future. Lets say in the next 15 years, while I still believe that html, css and javascript will remain.. I do think react, like angular, will be replaced by something else.

Honestly, I think its just a matter of time before WASM takes over or the evolution of such technology. Personally, I have toyed WASM builds in compiled languages and think it will win for web development for speed, performance, and lack of fluff. However, we are not there yet.

For example, I had to build a internal web application for staff. They have a number of drop downs and text fields, etc. I was experimenting implementing it with (something like) immediate mode UI such as IMGUI in Go. While the results were great, it reached a deadend not because of WASM, langauge, but lack of UI features. I needed to include OpenStreetMap, which is not supported. I had to bite the bullet and accept writing it as a typical Website.

I went with htmx + leafletjs in the end. Again, it worked out well.

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owebmaster 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

In 10 years, the people that knows React will be the minority compared to the ones that only know vibecoding.

	▲	xp84 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		True, but all the FE generated by that will be echoes of React, so my head will still hurt