The HTML Partial Trap: Why HTMX is Only Half the Story

While HTMX has successfully revived the HATEOAS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State) model, its insistence that the wire format must be HTML is a limitation. Performance: Benchmarks show that structured JSON (like oDOM or vDOM) can be parsed and rendered by the browser as fast as, or even faster than, raw HTML strings. Bandwidth: Thanks to Gzip, the size difference between HTML and JSON is negligible in real-world scenarios. Flexibility: HTML is for browsers; JSON is universal. Using JSON partials allows a single backend response to power Web, iOS (SwiftUI), and Android (Jetpack Compose) natively. Security: For AI-generated UIs, JSON provides a "sandboxed" way to define logic and layout without the security risks of executing raw HTML/JavaScript. The Verdict: Hypermedia is the correct architecture, but JSON is the better engine for a modern, cross-platform, and AI-integrated web.