Our hope is that by building up a set of these patterns, and making them available to agents via MCP, it will be as easy as possible to get things right.
I am not sure about prior art but the ability to mix built-in and user-defined components, and fluidly refactor the mixture, feels very powerful to me.
I wrestled with how much history to bring into this because I want to look forward not back. The purpose of the announcement is to encourage people to try the tool and find out for themselves if it is a productive way to build the user interfaces they need.
htmx enhances HTML with dynamic behavior using attributes like hx-get, letting the server drive updates via HTML fragments. It feels like a modern VB6: fast to prototype, pragmatic, and server-centric.
XMLUI takes a more structured approach: apps are built from declarative XML components with spreadsheet-like reactivity and client-side data binding. It’s closer to composing interfaces from reusable parts than wiring up behaviors.