To paraphrase: "I think HTMX is a great fit for <majority of websites on the internet> save for a few that want to be an _APP_"… :)

Agreed very much.

I'd extend this to "web apps that revolve around forms, views, filters and pagination" when it comes to "Ajax" stuff (yes, I'm old).

The part of htmx that's relevant to these topics being discussed here, I once wrote an inferior clone of, some years ago.

It was "isomorphic", tailored to our PHP-based CMS, and could handle filters, search forms, and pagination.

Suitable for forums definitely, and current PHP-based forum software vendors that are still on the market follow the same paradigm.

> Forum websites mostly deliver non-interactive content

I'd say that "Endless Scroll" is a good example of something that is... well maybe not interactive but still breaks the "just an HTML document" page metaphor that plays nice with such things.

Now, personally I find the UI compromises it takes to make endless scrolling happen are abhorrent (like not being able to ctrl-F or export the page content). But other people obviously like them.

Is that the kind of thing you'd be giving up as you move to a platform like HTMX?

> The only properly dynamic SPA-like feature in a forum I can think of is a WYSIWYG editor, but that you can build as a web component. Maybe a flexible highlight and quote system would be a bit difficult in pure HTMX (think of the comment functionality in Medium posts). So you'd want to build a few things in client side JS. But the main experience could very well be built with HTMX.

That's how interactivity has always worked.

Server-side render everything + ship interactivity via js on top of it.

I feel like most of the web developers forgot that React/Vue/etc solve a specific problem: single-page application.

This is a very narrow and specific problem: navigating from page to page not causing full page reloads.

But the web has changed since SPAs were needed in major ways:

1. the average device and connection is insanely faster than 10-15 years ago. Receiving and rendering content is not the problem it once was in the age of 2g connections and limited hardware mobile devices. Even the very low end phone from few years ago has nowadays 0 problems loading and parsing few hundred kbs of html and js.

2. Web technologies moved at all levels. Server technologies, cloud ones, browser ones. React and company are solving problems that barely belong to the modern web.

In short: today you can have an app-like, spa-like experience even out of fully server-side rendered applications. While also benefitting from shipping much less code to the client.

There's a very minimal amount of websites and applications out there that benefit, and aren't crippled by these rendering libraries: those that vastly leverage offline capabilities of the platform and want to keep working regardless of internet being available. I'm talking the notions and linears.

But bar from those, still working with this React slop is just not good for the user. Even multi billion companies hiring leetcode ninjas can't get acceptable user experience and performance out of those libraries, and it's not a coincidence: they keep forcing the wrong tool for the wrong problem.

They keep living in 2018 and at the end of the day the only excuse for those react/angular+tailwind slop is that there's an entire generation of developers that doesn't know anything else and has long lost any proper engineering skill (if there is any) in finding the right tool for the problem. This is a familiarity issue, not sound technical decisions. It's the "you can't go wrong with oracle/mysql/ibm", but actually you can, and it shows.

What's worse: it's incredibly cheap to experiment different solutions and approaches via LLMs in 2026, but people keep slopping the same monstrosities.