hx-swap="delete" should be allowed to work even with no request at all about htmx HOT 1 OPEN

Hey, while I understand the concern, imho this doesn't and shouldn't belong to htmx ; htmx's goal is to make interactions with the server, and with a pure client-side interaction like this, it would require a lot of specific if statements in the codebase to skip many parts of the usual process (no XMLHTTPRequest to make, but still fire the settling phase and events after that with the swap logic...)

You may want to look into hyperscript as this one is a pure client-side library.

Note that I would strongly advise using custom JS here, with a simple element.remove() call.
Or, if you really want some reusable thing within htmx only, make an extension of your own that sets up elements with a [hx-swap="delete"]|hx-target] selector for example, or something similar.

from htmx.