liFt-html vs lit-html

Lift vs Lit

I get a lot of people confused when I talk about liFt-html because they think it’s the same thing as lit-html. Lit stands for string template literal `html`. And Lift stands for lifting your existing HTML to become an app. One describes templating strategy, the other describes the approach of progressive enhancment.

In recent years, lit-html was effectively folded into the Lit framework and is rarely mentioned on its own anymore.

Core Philosophies

Lit is designed to compete with frameworks like React. And over the years a lot of features of Lit got built-in into the browsers which allows Lit to have pretty small bundle size (although not the smallest by any means).

Lit HTML is a templating engine, so it could compete with things like EJS, Eta, Pug, Jade, Handlebars. But it has some runtime performance characteristics that allow it to be more efficient for the use-case of rendering component templates, thus its use in Lit.

Lift HTML is a collection of opt-in modules that allows you to build applications in web-native manner with minimal overhead, philosophically it’s closer in use-case to something like Hotwire, but less opinionated. A toolkit for you to build html-first applications, adding splrinkles of JS when needed, adding signals or other reactive primitives when needed, adding server-driven interactivity when needed.