“100 years of htmx” is a joke, not a prediction about how long the project will last. Bytes #517 used the phrase to frame its September 1, 2026 issue around htmx 4.0, released on August 28, 2026. The useful story is the release: htmx uses HTML attributes to trigger requests and place server-returned HTML into a page, and version 4 adds or updates capabilities including morphing swaps, multi-target updates, and streaming-related extensions.
What does “100 years of htmx” mean?
It is comic hyperbole from the author of Bytes #517, not a project promise or a forecast supported by evidence. The issue closes by imagining future generations still writing htmx and joking that the author would take back past criticism of HTML if that happened. Its claim that htmx is “stable and ready to serve humanity for the next 100 years” belongs to that same humorous framing.
The concrete news behind the joke is htmx 4.0. The project announced the release on August 28, 2026, shortly before the newsletter’s September 1 issue.
What took so long to release htmx 4.0?
Bytes says htmx 4.0 arrived eight months after its alpha announcement and attributes the wait to work on a new extension system. That is the newsletter’s account of the timeline and development effort; the project’s release announcement confirms the release date and describes its features, but does not independently establish the alpha timeline or explain the team’s internal process.
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How does htmx work?
htmx lets HTML attributes describe interactions that would otherwise often be written in client-side JavaScript. An element can specify an HTTP request; when its configured event occurs, htmx sends that request. The server returns HTML, and htmx applies the response to the page’s DOM.
For example, hx-get sends a GET request. The official hx-get reference documents how to combine it with hx-target to select what element receives the update and hx-swap to control how the returned content is applied. By default, the response is swapped into the requesting element’s innerHTML. The htmx 4 documentation covers the current behavior and configuration.
What is new or changed in htmx 4.0?
The project describes htmx 4.0 as rewritten on top of the browser’s fetch API. Its August 28, 2026 announcement highlights several capabilities:
- Morphing swaps: a way to update page content while preserving matching DOM elements rather than treating every update as a simple replacement.
<hx-partial>: a mechanism for updating multiple targets from a response.- Extensions: the release announcement lists support for Server-Sent Events through
hx-sse, WebSockets throughhx-ws, and multipart streaming throughhx-multipart. It also highlights preloading and history caching.
These are release features, not evidence about how long htmx will be maintained or how widely it is used. The project’s htmx 4.0 release announcement and version 4 documentation are the appropriate references for implementation details.
What should existing htmx users check before upgrading?
Do not assume every example written for an earlier major version behaves identically in version 4. The project notes that attribute inheritance defaults changed in htmx 4. Review the version 4 documentation and migration guidance for the patterns your application uses, especially inherited hx-* attributes and any extensions. The cited release information does not establish adoption, performance benchmarks, or a guaranteed support lifespan.
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