This week I discovered an apparently-well-know-but-new-to-me web talent, Franz Bernack, aka @camelCase on YouTube. (Or @camelCaseDev? Or both??) In the video that led me to him, Franz presents 11 New CSS Features Every Browser Supports in 2025. Yeah, these kinds of videos are usually filled with stuff you cannot really use yet, but Franz squashes that concern right away, by stating right up front that all of the features he presents are Baseline 2025, including light-dark(), popover, relative color syntax, being able to use align-content on any block layout (not just within flexbox or grid), background-filter, target-text and more! So, have at it!
Chris Coyier offers up his own list in What You Need to Know about Modern CSS (2025 Edition). Chris does not explicitly state whether each feature is Baseline yet, so coder-beware!
Una Kravets shows off some cool uses for Anchor Position! (This is not quite Baseline yet, but certainly worth keeping an eye on…)
Saron Yitbarek shares how to use CSS Subgrid to help child elements line up across their parents. Brings some serious polish to the example, and its something we have all wanted wanted/needed to do in some layout we had to create…
Tired of your layout jumping when the scrollbar pops in? Well apparently so was Zach Leatherman, so he points out that we can now use scrollbar-gutter: stable; to avoid the issue! Zach’s example is a little more robust, but that’s the idea… ;-)
Sticking with CSS for just one more, Manuel Matuzović created a CSS Boilerplate. Based on Cascade Layers, it includes a reset (uaplus.css) and a few pre-defined rules, but mostly it is just the structure that you would need to start a new project, based on @layer.
Did you know that, if you are looking at a GitHub repo in your browser, you can jump directly into VS Code with a single keystroke? Yup, just hit that . and that repo will open in a browser-based VS Code for you, ready to edit/commit… Thanks, Kevin Powell!
Sticking with Kevin for a moment, he recently blasphemously questioned the idea of “mobile-first”… ;-P Actually, he’s not questioning mobile-first as a philosophy, just whether or not it has to be always for everything… I’m sure we’ve all had been in the situation where we had to change some CSS defaults to get the mobile layout we needed, then had to reset those defaults to make it work on desktop again, right? I’ve always hated doing that, wasting the time, energy, and having to send additional code to the user… Wouldn’t it make more sense to only change things that need to change for only the layout that needs it? So, maybe not so much “mobile-first“, but “simplicity-first” makes more sense?
Ever wonder if search and AI bots can access your site? CrawlerCheck will check for you.
And speaking of AI, Richard MacManus writes about The Agentic Web: How AI Agents Are Shaping the Web’s Future. Kicking off with quotes by, and bits about, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Richard goes on to define the agentic web, discuss MCP and the new W3C working group AI Agent Protocol Community Group, and several forerunners in the field.
And finally, any interest in learning How To Minimize The Environmental Impact Of Your Website? How about after reading this chilling quote?
If the internet were a country, it would be the 4th largest polluter in the world and represents the largest coal-powered machine on the planet.
Good God, what are we doing???
Well, it turns out that we can help fix this problem, and ain’t it a shocker, web performance can help lead the way! The author, James Chudley, does present a path to getting started. So, who’s with me???
And yes, I am well aware of the irony of having two AI-related topics in this post, and then ending with the topic of reducing energy-consumption…
Happy reading,
Atg