Building the Hundred-Year Web Service

It's been two years since I wrote my first production webservice with htmx. Two years is not a very long time, but early indicators suggest that the software projects I've written with htmx are a much better experience for users, and orders of magnitude easier to maintain, than the software projects they replaced. They are likely to remain useful...

A couple months ago I was sitting next to Ivy Wong and I saw them working on a dropdown menu so cute that I immediately asked how they did it. It looked something like this: ul.base { list-style-type: none; margin: 0 auto; padding: 0; width: fit-content; } .base li { background-color: bisque; border: 2px black solid; margin: 5px...

While I'm not going to settle the Single-Page Web Application (SPA) debate in a blog post, there is one claim about SPAs that routinely goes unchallenged, and it drives me nuts: that users prefer them because of the "modern," responsive feel. SPAs achieve their signature feel using partial page replacement: adding or removing DOM elements instead...

iframe { display: block; margin: 10px auto; } This past weekend, I gave a talk entitled "The Life & Death of htmx" at Big Sky Dev Con. Summary The thesis of the talk is that, with 30 years of real-world usage evidence, we have a clear understanding of HTML's limitations as hypertext, and with just three small additions to HTML, we can address...

The Classic Hello World Here's how you make a webpage that says "Hello World" in PHP: Hello World Name that file index.php and you're set. Awesome. Version 1 of our website looks like this: Okay, we can do a little better. Let's add the HTML doctype and element to make it a legal HTML5 page, an header to give the "Hello World" some heft, and a ...