The slippery slope that scares me (as a React developer) about htmx (or Hotwire.dev, in particular is the one I was looking at), is that you start making the assumption that the client's internet is fast.
There was demo that showed it normally takes ~100ms to click a mouse, and if you attach to the on-mouse-down, then by the time the mouse has been released (100ms later), you can have already fetched an updated rendered component from the server.
And while that's very cool, my second reaction is "is it ever acceptable to round-trip to the server to re-render a component that could have been updated fully-client side?" What happens when my internet (or the server) is slow, and it takes more than 100ms to fetch that data? Suddenly that's a really bad user-experience. In the general case this is a subjective question. I personally would rather wait longer for the site to load, but have a more responsive site once it did.
There's not a perfect solution to this, because in a complex site there are times that both the server and the client need to update the UI state. But having the source of truth for the UI located in a server miles away from the user is not a general-purpose solution.
(I'm not advocating for the status quo, either. I just wanted to bring up one concern of mine.)
There was demo that showed it normally takes ~100ms to click a mouse, and if you attach to the on-mouse-down, then by the time the mouse has been released (100ms later), you can have already fetched an updated rendered component from the server.
And while that's very cool, my second reaction is "is it ever acceptable to round-trip to the server to re-render a component that could have been updated fully-client side?" What happens when my internet (or the server) is slow, and it takes more than 100ms to fetch that data? Suddenly that's a really bad user-experience. In the general case this is a subjective question. I personally would rather wait longer for the site to load, but have a more responsive site once it did.
There's not a perfect solution to this, because in a complex site there are times that both the server and the client need to update the UI state. But having the source of truth for the UI located in a server miles away from the user is not a general-purpose solution.
(I'm not advocating for the status quo, either. I just wanted to bring up one concern of mine.)