>At this point why not just bite the bullet and go back to the old days of php serving html.
Going back to it is the point. HTMX lets you do that while still having that button refresh just a part of the page, instead of reloading the whole page.
It's AJAX with a syntax that frees you from JS and manual DOM manipulation.
I fairly recently developed an app in PHP, in the classic style, without frameworks.
It provided me with stuff I remembered, the $annoyance $of $variable $prefixes, the wonky syntax, and a type system that makes JS look amazing -- but it still didn't make me scream in pain and confusion like React. Getting the app done was way quicker than if any JS framework was involved.
Having two separate but tightly integrated apps is annoying. HTMX or any other classic web-dev approaches like PHP and Django make you have one app, the backend. The frontend is the result of executing the backend.
Going back to it is the point. HTMX lets you do that while still having that button refresh just a part of the page, instead of reloading the whole page. It's AJAX with a syntax that frees you from JS and manual DOM manipulation.
I fairly recently developed an app in PHP, in the classic style, without frameworks. It provided me with stuff I remembered, the $annoyance $of $variable $prefixes, the wonky syntax, and a type system that makes JS look amazing -- but it still didn't make me scream in pain and confusion like React. Getting the app done was way quicker than if any JS framework was involved.
Having two separate but tightly integrated apps is annoying. HTMX or any other classic web-dev approaches like PHP and Django make you have one app, the backend. The frontend is the result of executing the backend.