I think HTMX is a great fit for forum software. Forum websites mostly deliver non-interactive content in the form of text and maybe some audio, video, or image content. All of this can be represented as HTML and CSS.

With HTMX you can do partial rendering and live updates via server-sent events. This gets you most of the way to the "client side" feel where things load dynamically based on user actions.

The only properly dynamic SPA-like feature in a forum I can think of is a WYSIWYG editor, but that you can build as a web component. Maybe a flexible highlight and quote system would be a bit difficult in pure HTMX (think of the comment functionality in Medium posts). So you'd want to build a few things in client side JS. But the main experience could very well be built with HTMX.

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Pxtl an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Forum websites mostly deliver non-interactive content

I'd say that "Endless Scroll" is a good example of something that is... well maybe not interactive but still breaks the "just an HTML document" page metaphor that plays nice with such things.

Now, personally I find the UI compromises it takes to make endless scrolling happen are abhorrent (like not being able to ctrl-F or export the page content). But other people obviously like them.

Is that the kind of thing you'd be giving up as you move to a platform like HTMX?

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jimberlage 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I first learned about endless scroll in a Ruby on Rails meetup, where the presenter was showing how to craft snippets of HTML with ERB and using a bit of JS to insert them below the existing entries. It's definitely possible.

Maintaining a code path with a snippet for each possible viewing experience, back when REST was all the rage, was a bit obnoxious though.

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toddmorey 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nope, HTMX could power endless scroll features if you want them

	▲	egeozcan 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes but then you're doing HTMX not HTML and at that point why use something that's more flexible. I'm saying this as a person who still maintains a small application done with Intercooler.js and is perfectly happy with it. If you want basic interactivity, HTMX is fine. If you want something more (like sortable) I'd reach for lit instead of adding the Sortable.js dependency, something the HTMX docs suggest ( https://htmx.org/examples/sortable/ ) And yes there are also some scenarios that you want to control the whole routing and rendering stuff, then go for Solid, React, Angular, Vue, whatever. There is no golden rule to all of this but finding out what makes sense is a fun exercise.

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geysersam 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Infinite scroll with htmx: https://htmx.org/examples/infinite-scroll/

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epolanski 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The only properly dynamic SPA-like feature in a forum I can think of is a WYSIWYG editor, but that you can build as a web component. Maybe a flexible highlight and quote system would be a bit difficult in pure HTMX (think of the comment functionality in Medium posts). So you'd want to build a few things in client side JS. But the main experience could very well be built with HTMX.

That's how interactivity has always worked.

Server-side render everything + ship interactivity via js on top of it.

I feel like most of the web developers forgot that React/Vue/etc solve a specific problem: single-page application.

This is a very narrow and specific problem: navigating from page to page not causing full page reloads.

But the web has changed since SPAs were needed in major ways:

1. the average device and connection is insanely faster than 10-15 years ago. Receiving and rendering content is not the problem it once was in the age of 2g connections and limited hardware mobile devices. Even the very low end phone from few years ago has nowadays 0 problems loading and parsing few hundred kbs of html and js.

2. Web technologies moved at all levels. Server technologies, cloud ones, browser ones. React and company are solving problems that barely belong to the modern web.

In short: today you can have an app-like, spa-like experience even out of fully server-side rendered applications. While also benefitting from shipping much less code to the client.

There's a very minimal amount of websites and applications out there that benefit, and aren't crippled by these rendering libraries: those that vastly leverage offline capabilities of the platform and want to keep working regardless of internet being available. I'm talking the notions and linears.

But bar from those, still working with this React slop is just not good for the user. Even multi billion companies hiring leetcode ninjas can't get acceptable user experience and performance out of those libraries, and it's not a coincidence: they keep forcing the wrong tool for the wrong problem.

They keep living in 2018 and at the end of the day the only excuse for those react/angular+tailwind slop is that there's an entire generation of developers that doesn't know anything else and has long lost any proper engineering skill (if there is any) in finding the right tool for the problem. This is a familiarity issue, not sound technical decisions. It's the "you can't go wrong with oracle/mysql/ibm", but actually you can, and it shows.

What's worse: it's incredibly cheap to experiment different solutions and approaches via LLMs in 2026, but people keep slopping the same monstrosities.

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ko27 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> the average device and connection is insanely faster than 10-15 years ago

Using the same reasoning, I’d come to the opposite conclusion. Devices are much faster than they were 10-15 years ago, but network latency is still roughly the same because physics limits how much it can improve. So reducing network round trips matters more than ever, which favors SPAs over MPAs.

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an hour ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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bbg2401 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m not sure I follow.

SPA’s tend to require more network round trips, sometimes significantly more based on the architecture.

	▲	Izkata an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		But a lot of the time they can happen in the background where the user doesn't see them, or on a part of the page the user isn't currently interacting with, preventing it from being a stop-the-world interruption.
	▲	ko27 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It’s in the name: an MPA requires a page roundtrip for every navigation, while SPA requires a single page roundtrip. Any subsequent requests are part of the application itself and can be handled without disrupting UX.

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johsole 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One nice thing about using React even on the web is that it forces your Backend to be REST right from the start. Although I sincerely thing that is less important now with the explosion of LLMs. I've started thinking about everything as Display + MCP Server. Where a SPA front end is really just pre-defined display.

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shooly 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> React/Vue/etc solve a specific problem: single-page application

That's not true. They solve the problem of requiring separate code paths for interactive elements - one for initial render and another for updates.

Previously the server rendered the initial HTML and then client JS updated it after e.g. user clicks a button, but with React/Vue/etc., it's merged into one code path because HTML is derived from the current state.

> Even multi billion companies hiring leetcode ninjas can't get acceptable user experience

Modern UX is bad because many front-end programmers fundamentally just do not care about the UX, it's not about the specific tech they use.

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recursive 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Only react "solves" that. In vue component setup only runs during mount. Update is not a thing in the way react has it.

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epolanski 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> A Single-Page Application (SPA) is a web application or website that loads a single HTML page and dynamically updates its content as users interact with it, rather than loading entire new pages from the server.

That's the definition, I didn't made it up.

And those libraries solve that.

Your other definition, can be fully implemented server side, Elixir's Phoenix does that. But it's not the only one.

	▲	robertlagrant an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> That's the definition, I didn't made it up. Your prior claim was that they only solve one problem, not about a definition. They solve several problems: - less data can move over the wire compared to sending a full page every time (this is in your definition, and is definitely not always true, as sometimes REST APIs can return far more data than what's needed to render the screen) - the same REST/data API can serve your website and other consumers, e.g. any native mobile apps or third party API consumers - you can write tests for your frontend, e.g. you can unit test components' behaviour and style in isolation - the frontend can also work, or at least respond usefully to the user, when the network or the backend are not working
	▲	shooly an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You said, that React/Vue/etc. solve a specific problem: SPAs - that's not accurate. That's not the problem they solve. According to what you said, CSS also solves the problem of making an SPA because you could "switch pages" by changing CSS class names on `body`. But if someone asked what CSS is you're not gonna answer "you use CSS to make an SPA", even though _technically_ you can use it to make an SPA.