Well, I never expected to get a reply from the man himself. Thank you for taking the time to respond.

So, I did end up going with #1 with a slight variation.

You also commented on another comment of mine stating:

> if you are using the htmx javascript API extensively rather than the attributes, you are not using htmx as it was intended

There seems to be some confusion, and I apologize. I extensively used attributes. That wasn't the part of the API I was referring to. Rather, I should have specified that I was heavily relying on a lot of the htmx.on() and html.trigger() methods. My usage of htmx.trigger() was predominately due to something being triggered on page load, but also, it needed to be triggered again if a certain condition was met -- to refetch the html with the new data -- if that makes sense.

I should also preface that I was working on this project about two years ago. It looks like a lot has changed with HTMX since then!