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htmx Tutorial · htmx Basics · Lesson 4 of 30

htmx History & Versions

How htmx grew out of intercooler.js, why its authors call it a return to hypermedia, every version from 1.0 to 4.0 on one timeline, and which version to use today.

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How htmx started

In 2013, Carson Gross released intercooler.js, a jQuery plugin that let HTML attributes such as ic-get-from load content from the server. It was a quiet alternative to the JavaScript-heavy single-page apps that were taking over web development.

In 2020 he rewrote it without jQuery, with cleaner attribute names, and called it htmx (version 0.0.1 appeared in May 2020). htmx 1.0 was released on 24 November 2020. The project is free and open source (Zero-Clause BSD licence) and has no company behind it.

Hypermedia, again

The htmx authors describe it as completing HTML as a hypermedia: links and forms were the original way to make web pages interactive, but HTML stopped evolving there. htmx lets any element make any kind of request and update any part of the page, so servers can keep sending HTML instead of JSON. In 2023 Carson Gross, Adam Stepinski and Deniz Akşimşek published the free book Hypermedia Systems, and htmx became one of the most discussed front-end tools of the year, popular with Django, Flask, Rails, Laravel and Go developers.

Timeline

  1. htmx 4.0Latest
    • Requests use fetch() (streaming), explicit attribute inheritance with :inherited, error responses swapped by default
    • New event names (htmx:before:request), morph swaps (innerMorph, outerMorph), hx-status, <hx-partial>
  2. htmx 2.0Current
    • Internet Explorer support dropped; extensions moved to their own packages
    • hx-on:<event> syntax, DELETE parameters sent in the URL, selfRequestsOnly on by default
    • The 2.x line (2.0.11, September 2026) is supported indefinitely and is npm's latest
  3. htmx 1.9Supported
    • The final 1.x feature release; the 1.x line still works in Internet Explorer 11
  4. htmx 1.0Historic
    • The first stable release, a replacement for intercooler.js
  5. htmx 0.0.1Historic
    • The first htmx release, a jQuery-free rewrite of intercooler.js
  6. htmx intercooler.jsHistoric
    • The jQuery-based predecessor of htmx

Which version should I use?

Use htmx 2 for existing projects and when you depend on extensions that haven't moved to htmx 4 yet; it stays supported. htmx 4 suits new projects that want streaming and the newer API. The main upgrade work is described in Upgrading to htmx 4.

Official resources

Last reviewed 21 October 2026. Release and support dates come from the official release pages linked above.

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