What's changed since 2024

I wrote most of this site at the end of 2023. The tools moved on. The ideas didn’t.

Here’s what’s different, and what it means for you.

htmx

htmx 2 came out in June 2024. It dropped Internet Explorer, moved extensions out of the core file, and changed a few defaults. Nothing that touches the mental model.

htmx 4 came out in 2026. This one is a bigger step. The main changes:

• attribute inheritance is now explicit. If you want a child to inherit hx-target from a parent, you write hx-target:inherited on the parent
• responses with a 4xx or 5xx status are swapped by default, so you can render error messages from the server
• history navigation asks the server for the page again instead of using a local snapshot
• a new <hx-partial> tag lets one response update many parts of the page, without relying on id matching

The core idea is identical: any element can make a request, any event can trigger it, the server sends back HTML.

htmx 4 is not marked as latest on npm yet, so npm install htmx.org still gives you 2.x. The team plans to flip that in 2027. The examples on this site use 4.

There is an upgrade checker if you have a 2.x app:

npx htmx.org@4.0.0 upgrade-check -- .

Alpine.js

Alpine is still on version 3. Same API, same script tag, steady releases.

That’s a feature. You learned it once, it still works.

Astro

Astro moved fastest of the three. Three major versions.

Astro 5 (December 2024) introduced the content layer and server islands. The output: 'hybrid' mode went away: you now use output: 'static' and mark single pages with export const prerender = false, or output: 'server' to render everything on demand.

Astro 6 (2026) rebuilt the dev server so it runs your real production runtime. For Cloudflare this is a big deal: astro dev runs on workerd, and bindings like D1 and KV work locally. You import them with import { env } from 'cloudflare:workers'. It also added a Fonts API, live content collections, and Content Security Policy support.

Astro 7 (2026) is about speed. The compiler and the Markdown pipeline are now written in Rust, and builds run on Vite 8. It also added advanced routing through a src/fetch.ts file, so you can wrap Astro in Hono or plain fetch handlers.

One thing to know if you come from Astro 4: on-demand rendered pages now check the Origin header on POST requests by default. htmx requests from your own pages pass. A bare curl -X POST gets rejected.

What I’d do differently

Not much.

The little example now runs on Cloudflare Workers with D1 instead of a file in /tmp. Same three files, same htmx attributes.

The stack still fits in an afternoon.