3 posts tagged “carson-gross”
2025
The fetch()ening (via) After several years of stable htmx 2.0 and a promise to never release a backwards-incompatible htmx 3 Carson Gross is technically keeping that promise... by skipping to htmx 4 instead!
The main reason is to replace XMLHttpRequest with fetch() - a change that will have enough knock-on compatibility effects to require a major version bump - so they're using that as an excuse to clean up various other accumulated design warts at the same time.
htmx is a very responsibly run project. Here's their plan for the upgrade:
That said, htmx 2.0 users will face an upgrade project when moving to 4.0 in a way that they did not have to in moving from 1.0 to 2.0.
I am sorry about that, and want to offer three things to address it:
- htmx 2.0 (like htmx 1.0 & intercooler.js 1.0) will be supported in perpetuity, so there is absolutely no pressure to upgrade your application: if htmx 2.0 is satisfying your hypermedia needs, you can stick with it.
- We will create extensions that revert htmx 4 to htmx 2 behaviors as much as is feasible (e.g. Supporting the old implicit attribute inheritance model, at least)
- We will roll htmx 4.0 out slowly, over a multi-year period. As with the htmx 1.0 -> 2.0 upgrade, there will be a long period where htmx 2.x is
latestand htmx 4.x isnext
There are lots of neat details in here about the design changes they plan to make. It's a really great piece of technical writing - I learned a bunch about htmx and picked up some good notes on API design in general from this.
The future of htmx. Carson Gross and Alex Petros lay out an ambitious plan for htmx: stay stable, add few features and try to earn the same reputation for longevity that jQuery has (estimated to be used on 75.3% of websites).
In particular, we want to emulate these technical characteristics of jQuery that make it such a low-cost, high-value addition to the toolkits of web developers. Alex has discussed "Building The 100 Year Web Service" and we want htmx to be a useful tool for exactly that use case.
Websites that are built with jQuery stay online for a very long time, and websites built with htmx should be capable of the same (or better).
Going forward, htmx will be developed with its existing users in mind. [...]
People shouldn’t feel pressure to upgrade htmx over time unless there are specific bugs that they want fixed, and they should feel comfortable that the htmx that they write in 2025 will look very similar to htmx they write in 2035 and beyond.
2024
My preferred approach in many projects is to do some unit testing, but not a ton, early on in the project and wait until the core APIs and concepts of a module have crystallized.
At that point I then test the API exhaustively with integrations tests.
In my experience, these integration tests are much more useful than unit tests, because they remain stable and useful even as you change the implementation around. They aren’t as tied to the current codebase, but rather express higher level invariants that survive refactors much more readily.