FAQs
Q: Does this have any chance of happening?
A: Yes.
Once a feature is added to the HTML standard, it's there forever, so new features must be feasible for implementers, useful for developers, and beneficial for users.
We expect Triptych to take take years and incorporate many rounds of feedback.
Nevertheless, they're worth the effort.
We are working with browser implementers to specify this at the necessary level of detail and are making progress on the contributions required to land Triptych in browser engines.
Q: Why not do this in JavaScript?
A: Putting common functionality in HTML benefits everyone.
Web developers often have to implement the same patterns over and over again.
Building proven functionality into HTML is a longstanding design principle, delightfully known as "Paving the Cowpaths."
These patterns were carefully chosen for their universality and power.
Web developers frequently use HTTP lifecycle methods, set buttons to perform network requests, and update parts of the page based on the server response.
The chosen grammar enables the most common subset of that functionality, letting developers save time, money, and code dependencies for the truly custom parts of their application.
Web browsers are also not the only HTML clients.
Search engine crawlers, RSS readers, AI agents, even browsers features like Reader Mode—they all read and transform HTML to perform different, specialized functions.
The more web functionality that is described in HTML, the better these products can be.
Q: Why these specific features?
A: They generalize hypermedia controls.
One answer to this question is: because they are very useful and largely uncontroversial.
A more complicated answer is that these features complete HTML's ability to do Representational State Transfer (REST) by making it a sufficient self-describing representation for a much wider variety of problem spaces.
That this can be accomplished with such tiny API changes is a testament to how effective HTML already is.
In September 2025, some members of the Triptych Project co-authored a research paper on what Triptych could accomplish for HTML as a hypertext, and what it reveals about where HTML could go next.
Q: What if I need the functionality provided by [HTML attribute library]?
A: You can still use them!
The three features chosen for Triptych are quite limited in scope relative to JavaScript offerings like htmx, hotwired, and unpoly.
Triptych offers a basic, HTML-compatible version of those features;
it's the greatest common denominator between them all.