(2023-08-19) Htmx Why Htmx Does Not Have A Build Step

Why htmx Does Not Have a Build Step. The full htmx source is a single 3,500-line JavaScript file

From my perspective, here’s why htmx does not have a build step.

The best reason to write a library in plain JavaScript is that it lasts forever.

A more significant cost for using TypeScript is that the code running in the browser is not the code you wrote, which makes the browser’s developer tools harder to use. When your TypeScript code throws an exception, you have to figure out how the stack trace (with its JavaScript line numbers, JavaScript function signatures, and so forth) maps to the TypeScript code that you wrote; when your JavaScript code throws an exception, you can click straight through to the source code, read the thing you wrote, and set a breakpoint in the debugger. This is tremendous DX.