We confuse improving the developer experience with improving the web

I was reading the HTMX documentation, and it made me think about how many abstractions we’ve created to make web development easier: frameworks, reactivity, compilers, and new ways to build interfaces, and during this process, maybe we forgot that many of those problems already had a solution: HTML, links, forms, GET, and POST.

Maybe React wasn’t a bad solution, but maybe the problem was turning these kinds of abstractions into the starting point, even when the tools provided by the web were enough, and that’s what I like about HTMX, it reminds us how much we can do by simply using the web as it was designed.