What is htmx and why is it relevant?

I started my tech career as a MERN (MongoDB, ExpressJS, React, NodeJS) web application developer. The modern web development stack consists of a minimum of HTML ( Hypertext markup language ), CSS ( Cascading style sheets ), and Javascript. Every web page has HTML as the skeleton ( The Document Object Model ), CSS as its skin, and Javascript doing most of the heavy lifting. Because these technologies are the bread and butter of web development, several new and exciting libraries make programming with these tools refreshing. I heard some buzz regarding htmx and decided to check it out.

htmx is a lightweight JavaScript library that allows developers to create dynamic web applications by extending HTML’s capabilities. It enables developers to use HTML attributes to define how a page should behave, facilitating async requests, partial page updates, and other interactive features without relying heavily on other JavaScript [JS] libraries and frameworks.

<script src="https://unpkg.com/htmx.org@2.0.3"></script> <! - have a button POST a click via AJAX → <button hx-post="/clicked" hx-swap="outerHTML"> Click Me </button> The hx-post and hx-swap attributes on this button communicate with the htmx library: