For years developers have been pushing the boundaries of what a website or web application can do. This push has largely been through advancements made in JavaScript. Today we have all kinds of JavaScript libraries and frameworks that try to solve the problems of enhancing functionality without weighing down loading times. While many of them have succeeded in mitigating these problems, such as React with the use of the “Virtual DOM”, complexity remains high and there are still battles to keep loading times down. JavaScript is heavy and HTML can only do so much.

HTMX is a new approach to handling user interactivity and AJAX requests that essentially uses JavaScript to make HTML more powerful by enhancing the abilities of attributes.

Creator of HTMX, Carson Gross, said in an interview with The New Stack, “I think a lot of the JavaScript frameworks now, you’re building almost a thick client in the browser. You’re just using the browser as the virtual machine to do that. When you’re in that world, you can do a lot more, obviously, but there’s a lot more complexity.”

While it is still technically uses JavaScript itself, it is dependency-free which helps keep it light. This leads to faster initial page loads and decreases the amount of processing that must be done on the client-side. HTMX can handle many useful frontend tasks such as CSS transitions, Server Sent Events, AJAX, and Web Sockets, all by using hypertext.

This does not mean that it does not have its limitations. There are still plenty of reasons to forego HTMX for a larger JavaScript library or framework, depending on what the need for your site or application is. This does mean, however, that for many smaller projects out there, HTMX could be a simpler and lighter alternative to building a user interface with functionality.