Big news this week from the land of Safari (no, not in Africa): INP is available in TP 229! With any luck, LCP will be not far behind, as both are part of Interop 2025. Would sure be great to be able to more-reliably monitor web performance!
Last week Jeremy Wagner advised that Baseline is now built-in to Browserlist! So you can now use configs like baseline widely available, baseline 2021, or even something like baseline widely available on 2024-06-06!
And Rachel Andrew advised that Google has updated their Learn CSS, now including topics such as CSS nesting, Container queries, Custom properties, Anchor positioning, Popover, dialog and more! Can’t wait to refresh m’self!
And speaking of learning new CSS, Ahmad Shadeed shared the video and slides from his Smart Layouts presentation at CSS Day in Amsterdam, back in June 2025. I have always loved how Ahmad presents, so very easy to listen to, understand and learn from! Love the idea of expanding the definition of responsive web design to be even more inclusive!
Manuel Matuzović shares his workaround for using custom properties in media queries. I hadn’t run into this problem before, but I am sure I would have one day, and nice to know there is a way to get around it!
Bramus Van Damme shows off a very slick custom --light-dark() function in CSS that can swap not only colors, but also images and more.
Sticking with the idea of expanding light-dark(), Sunkanmi Fafowora asks Should the CSS light-dark() Function Support More Than Light and Dark Values? The idea being that we might want to offer other options as well, such as grayscale, high contrast, low contrast, or maybe even some custom values. Well, turns out that might already be in the works, as Sunkanmi links to several resources talking about exactly that!
I have to agree with Daniel Schwarz on this one:
Beyond the classics like
@media(min-width: 400px)and…user-preferencemedia queries… I can’t say that I was using media queries a whole lot.
But Daniel digs through them all in his How much do you really know about media queries? article…
The great Ana Tudor shows-off how to create an inset shadow on an image. Not something you need everyday, but a cool, unexpected effect. The answer comes via an SVG filter, but let’s let Ana walk us through, shall we? ;-)
Jono Alderson offers an opinionated piece about how JavaScript broke the web, making it bloated, overly-complicated, and fragile. I do not completely disagree, but to be fair, it is not JS’ fault; it is ours, because we over-/mis-used it… Jono walks us through the history, including the advent of DX (bleh!), reminds of numerous pitfalls along the way, acknowledges the remaining roadblocks, and suggests a bold way forward: Ask the question “Do we need this?” with each new project. If we do, we do, then add it. Or better yet, only add something if and when if becomes necessary… But please, stop making “all the things” the default…
And new-to-me Lyra Rebane continues that theme by suggesting a few places where we can replace JS with just HTML and/or CSS! Again, reducing the JS workload means the page can respond more snappily, and the JS can focus its energy on more important tasks!
Frank M gives a nice run-through on how to manage CSS performance, starting with, or course, “probably don’t”… But then, if you are really, really, really sure that everything else is sorted, he does give some really good examples of how to improve CSS performance. But seriously, it’s probably not the CSS…
Andy Biggs walks us through Speedcurve‘s new Vitals Overview Dashboard. A great way to spot performance issues fast, and ensure they are real issues, before diving in to find, and solve, it…
And speaking of spotting performance issues, Vanessa Denice points the spotlight on The Hidden Third-Party Tax on eCommerce Performance…
On category and product detail pages, brands now average more than 40 third-party tags [which] account for nearly 60% of total page load time…
:puke:
Dan Odell reminds about the output element (a reminder for some of us, surely new to others). I do have to admit, I knew of this element, but do not think I have ever actually used it… Which is a shame! Because, as Dan points out, it comes with baked-in semantics and accessibility that we would otherwise have to fight to add in, or worse, simply ignore… :-/
And finally, in one of Kevin Powell‘s recent email newsletters, he bemoaned how CSS adoption has slowed in recent years. (Or at least how new features have not recently been adopted as quickly as new features in years past…) I think there could be several reasons for this, like “I already know how to get something done one way, I don’t really need another”, or similar to that, but “I don’t really have time to learn another”. I think some are also never quite sure when something new is “safe to use”… As great as CanIUse and Baseline are, there’s no “ding” that goes off when some new-ish feature suddenly becomes “widely available”. And even then, it’s not like we’re going to go back through existing projects and update perfectly-working code. That means new features are probably only ever going to be used for brand new projects. And when we need to do something, we are probably going to reach for what we already know… So, maybe what we need is a list of “if you’re about to use this, now you can use this“? And maybe some way to see “what’s been added most recently” (hold this thought, see below)? It would at least allow us to check for new replacement options, try to remember that the new feature can be used now, then come back and check for it when we need it. Oh, and I think it should be only stuff that is Widely Available, so we know we can trust it in the wild. My two thoughts… Who’s in???
And finally finally, it looks like there is a list of all the Newly- and Widely-Available features for September 2025! (And apparently they’ve been doing this every month, because this is the list for August 2025…) This is great, I have been looking for this for some time! It’s a great way to find new stuff that we can start using! (And realize what stuff you maybe shouldn’t have been using up to now???)
Happy reading,
Atg