c'twebdev 2025 Inspirations

New web services are being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, and existing experiences are now pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?

HTMX is a JavaScript framework that makes it possible to replace DOM elements with dynamic data from AJAX requests, specified by HTML attributes. Because dynamic behavior is added to the page using normal HTML tags with custom attributes, it is difficult to provide additional security against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

A short post on the foundations of photography in relation to working on the web

A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

Step by step guide to becoming a modern frontend developer in 2025

Everything that is there to learn about React and the ecosystem in 2025.

The age of frontend JavaScript frameworks eating the web world didn’t happen simply because some well-meaning developers found great DX. It happened because we were fed a line.

This paper measures and explains cost risk for IT projects, compared with 22 other project types. The null hypothesis is that IT projects are not different from

It’s always safe to assume JavaScript will not be available, so here’s a quick list of very realistic reasons it won’t be.

What is a Banana Curving Machine? Well it's a fantastic apparatus that does what it says. Curves Bananas.

Onboarding a team to #htmx - it seems like it „clicks“ once people understand `Hx-Target`, `Hx-Trigger`, `Hx-swap-oob` and `Hx-trigger-after-swap`. This seemed to be the point where the interactions usually build using a JS framework become reproducible using HTMx. People are excited, especially that they don’t have to duplicate auth. and validation.

Learn the basics of htmx - an HTML-focused UI library that can handle data fetching and rendering in web applications without complex JavaScript code or fram...

The revolutionary ideas that empowered the Web. A simpler approach to building applications on the Web and beyond with htmx and Hyperview. Enhancing web applications without using SPA frameworks.

Chris James, London - Software Engineer

htmx gives you access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext htmx is small (~14k min.gz’d), dependency-free, extendable, IE11 compatible & has reduced code base sizes by 67% when compared with react

Related to most of the below topics is the fact that the web has, at its heart, a pretty simple and flexible architecture. 24 years in and the web’s basic conceptual model still seems remarkably robust.

This talk describes building web applications focused on hypermedia, an approach that differs significantly from the SPA frameworks popular today such as Rea...

From React to htmx on a real-world SaaS product: we did it, and it's awesome! by David GuillotWe took the plunge and replaced the 2-year-of-work React UI of ...

In this essay, Carson Gross and Alex Petros discuss htmx's future direction and philosophy. They explain how the project aims to emulate jQuery's success through API stability, minimal feature additions, and quarterly releases while continuing to promote hypermedia-driven development and support the broader web development ecosystem.

The web development community talks a lot about single-page apps, but are we all on a single page? Here's my ontology of web app architectures, organized by rendering and navigation.

In an age of complicated front-end solutions, is there a simpler way of doing things? Spoiler alert: there is.

Tony Alaribe challenges common myths about multi-page applications (MPAs) and explores how modern browser technologies can enable fast, interactive, and offline-capable web applications without relying on single-page application (SPA) frameworks. Alaribe discusses advancements in service workers, caching, and cross-document transitions, offering insights into building efficient MPAs. By debunking myths like slow page transitions and the necessity of JavaScript-heavy frameworks, Alaribe highlights how developers can leverage HTML, CSS, and minimal JavaScript to create robust, user-friendly web apps in 2024.

Instead of starting with a framework, smart frontend developers now begin with HTML and enhance it progressively with JavaScript.

Mark Volkmann's Tech Blog

Modern web development embraced complexity with React, but at what cost? HTMX is a lightweight, progressively enhanced alternative, embraces fundamentals, and reduces dependency overhead.

One of the oft-repeated myths I hear from framework evangelists is that tools like React are better for performance because “they use a virtual DOM instead of the real DOM.” First, that’s objectively false. In certain situations (like UIs with comically large amounts of div nesting) moving DOM diffing to a virtual layer can improve the performance of that specific step. But eventually, they have to touch the real DOM. That’s how you manipulate and update elements.

This week, we’ve been looking at harmful complexity in web projects, and why choosing React for mostly static web projects is bad. These days, it’s common for mostly static websites to have a little bit of dynamic content. And while React can add that content, it’s often the wrong choice. Let’s dig in! The problem with React A lot of DOM interactions just don’t require that much JavaScript to work, but React adds tens of megabytes of code that needs to be downloaded, compiled, and parsed.

Just a little ranty rant about my fave JS library, ya know.