I went back to Bozeman!

When I advise people on how they should structure a web service, I always start from the same place: make a server that responds to HTTP requests with HTML text.

Naming things properly is very hard to do, so, as programmers, we come up with little rules to help us. These rules are often inconsistent.

A central concept to HTML, and hypertext theory more generally, is something called Representational State Transfer, a.k.a. REST. Over at htmx, a lot of the writing we do is based on REST theory.

REST is a widely misunderstood term, and if you point that out to people, you will be told, repeatedly and sometimes quite irately: who cares? REST has a new meaning now—use words the way people understand them and spare us the lecture.

My UtahJS talk, “Building the Hundred-Year Web Service”, was put online this week! It’s about how to build software infrastructure that lasts a very long time.

It’s been two years since I wrote my first production webservice with htmx. Two years is not a very long time, but early indicators suggest that the software projects I’ve written with htmx are a much better experience for users, and orders of magnitude easier to maintain, than the software projects they replaced. They are likely to remain useful for longer than anything else I’ve ever written (so far). Pretty good!

Like any new tool, especially a tool that got popular as quickly as htmx, there are differing schools of thought on how best to use it. My approach—which I believe necessary to achieve the results described above—requires you to internalize something that htmx certainly hints at, but doesn’t enforce: use plain HTML wherever possible.

A couple months ago I was sitting next to Ivy Wong and I saw them working on a dropdown menu so cute that I immediately asked how they did it.

While I’m not going to settle the Single-Page Web Application (SPA) debate in a blog post, there is one claim about SPAs that routinely goes unchallenged, and it drives me nuts: that users prefer them because of the “modern,” responsive feel.

This past weekend, I gave a talk entitled “The Life & Death of htmx” at Big Sky Dev Con.

The comment I received most frequently on “Behavior Belongs in the HTML” was: “don’t Web Components solve this?”

When you click the button below, it’s going to show you a little message.