After 20+ years of writing JavaScript for complex production systems, I got exhausted by how heavy modern web development had become. React, state managers, build tools… just to make a few HTML elements talk to each other. I kept thinking back to the elegance of Smalltalk, where objects simply send messages to each other. At the same time, I was deeply inspired by HTMX, which showed me how powerful and simple the web could be again when you let HTML do more of the work. I wondered: What if we combined Smalltalk’s beautiful message-passing model with HTMX-style declarative power directly in the DOM? What problem were you trying to solve? I wanted a way for HTML elements to communicate directly and declaratively, without writing tons of imperative JavaScript, without a virtual DOM, and without any dependencies. No more wiring event listeners everywhere. I needed something tiny and fun: send messages, chain actions with pipes , run things in parallel with ;, fetch content, and update the UI, all from simple attributes in plain HTML.

talkDOM

Smalltalk-inspired message passing for the DOM

Smalltalk-inspired message passing for the DOM