alt Hacker NewsPlain HTML is very cozy to me - I came of age in that era. Marquee tags 4eva.
But as much as I hate to admit it, it is very difficult to build something functional today with plain HTML and no/minimal JS. If you want, say, a model form that manages its children as well, you're basically going to end up with a 2003-era ASP-feeling application with way too many views and forms (as seen on your employer's current HR system). Or you use HTMX... and you still end up with just as many (partial) views, but now with so much implicit state that you're veering into write-only code.
I dislike modern JS to the extent that I opted for Phoenix LiveView, just so I could achieve interactivity without ever having to touch JS, but in truth it's not a comprehensive solution. Still had to write a web worker, a bridge to handle things like notifications, etc. Plus the future direction of Phoenix, all in on AI, is worrying.
Honestly, I should probably just swallow my disdain and learn to appreciate and use modern JS, as painful as that sounds. I want to write and release cool things, not get caught up in navel-gazing language wars.
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> Or you use HTMX... and you still end up with just as many (partial) views, but now with so much implicit state that you're veering into write-only code.
You're overthinking htmx then. I do some fairly complex stuff with no extra partials. Trick is just always rerender and use hx-select and hx-target to slice out the bits you want to update on the current page.
Server always has authoritative state and code is dead simple to reason about.
I miss marquee... I burned more tokens than I'd like to admit to build a marquee-like feature in react and it was really just the same text twice with an animation that hopefully no one notices isn't a clean loop on some viewport sizes (since it restarts after reaching the end).
OT: marquee tags were a missed opportunity to implement horizontal scrolling often used on shopping websites. Now it uses JS to achieve the same.
I have been trying to find other more commonly known UI patterns that could be done natively. The time has long come for tabular data to be put into HTML tables just by referencing the source. Xslt almost did that. Another one is integrating xml http requests with native html. I think HTMz came close to this.
I haven't used it in anger myself, but if you know Elixir and Phoenix you might like Gleam, which compiles to Javascript.
> But as much as I hate to admit it, it is very difficult to build something functional today with plain HTML and no/minimal JS.
I would certainly agree that using a little JS can get you further than just HTML. But I think that a plain HTML page is far more pleasant to use (and thus, functional) than the JS monstrosities that dominate the Web today. There's a reason people use the NoScript addon: because a whole lot of website designers use JS in ways that make the experience a ton worse for the user.