Just to be clear, are you talking about some kind of templating library that literally transpiles all the htmx logic and instead packs it into individual ajax logic in js files “per element”, such that you don’t need to serve htmx client side and instead you pre-transpile all the ajax logic out to separate files?

My brother in Christ, what the fuck are you talking about "transpiling HTMX" and "serving HTMX client side?" You don't "serve" HTMX and there's nothing to "transpile into JavaScript." It is JavaScript. That's like saying you "serve React client side" and "transpile JavaScript into more JavaScript." Jesus, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Cause the very start of my statements was that if we had something like that then HTMX would be fine, as a templating lib that transpiled out to html+js.

Oh, okay, so you don't actually know what HTMX is or how it works, then? Because HTMX (https://htmx.org/) is a JavaScript library. Like, literally just a JavaScript library. It's like....4000 lines of JavaScript. In fact you can read the source code for it here: https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/blob/master/src/htmx.js. For some...insane reason you seem to think HTMX is its own language. It's not. It's...just a JavaScript library. There is no other language called HTMX. There is no other mechanism or tool called HTMX. No implementation or protocol or ANYTHING else. It's just a small JavaScript library.

invoke arbitrary logic with html attributes

Once again, HTMX enhances HTML with various attributes declaratively. It utilizes custom data attributes in HTML (like hx-get, hx-post) to specify how elements on the page should behave - essentially, how and where to fetch data or submit forms without a full page reload. This is a form of declarative programming that tells the htmx.js library (which is just doing fucking AJAX) what to do when certain events occur (e.g., a click or a form submission). The actions (like the actual requesting of data from an endpoint) are performed by the code in htmx.js.

This is a fancy way of saying "if you stick an hx-get attribute on a button, then you can just say where you want a GET request to go to and what element you want updated with the HTML returned from it and htmx.js will parse that out on page load and set an event listener for the button click to know when to initiate an AJAX request to the defined endpoint." If you had an hx-get attribute in an element in a page and that page didn't have the htmx.js library loaded it would do literally nothing.

And, once again, HTMX, being a JavaScript library, operates under the same security constraints as any JavaScript executed in the browser. This means that:

1. HTMX's scripts themselves must be loaded from sources allowed by the script-src CSP directive.
2. Any dynamic requests to load content or submit data initiated by HTMX are subject to CSP's connect-src directive.