I wasn’t planning on writing another post before the end of the year, but there is so much good content out there that I just couldn’t help myself!

A couple of insightful articles from the HTMHell Advent Calendar:

• Abbreviations done right: The <abbr> element and why not use it by Alexander Muzenhardt. I have put SO much time and energy into always wrapping the abbr element around every abbreviation I use, that I find this article completely and thoroughly deflating… It seems such a useful element, why would screen readers not consistently support this??? :-(
• HTML Input Validation is (maybe) Good by Wes Goulet. This is one of those HTML features that I feel like fell into the browsers in such a piece-meal fashion that I don’t think I ever fully believed/trusted it… But it does seem to have grown up and settled down a bit, though here too, we find Accessibility lagging behind…

Meanwhile a slew of articles from the Web Performance Calendar tripped my radar over the past several days!

• Conor McCarthy from DebugBear shares Insights from 100 site speed reviews in 2025. Some good points from dealing with customer conversations.
• Jordy Scholing from RUMVision discusses why optimizing for 75% is fine, but optimizing for 90% is where it gets interesting. Indeed. Getting things in shape for the majority is fine, but is that extra 25% really worth throwing away? Does someone out there not need that extra revenue??
• Barry Pollard from Google (and, well, just being Barry!), explains the issue that URL params cause with regards to caching, and walks us through what Google is trying to do about it.
• Robin Marx from Akamai goes deep to explain why TTFB doesn’t mean what you think it means. Yeah, there’s a lot to that one “simple” metric…
• Sébastien Mischler from Infomaniak introduces a new take on an old subject: HTML Streaming. The possible performance benefits are intriguing, but the trade-offs are troublesome to me…
• Joan León from PerfReviews kindly shares tips for using DevTools for debugging web performance. One can never see enough tips and tricks for DevTools…
• Followed quickly by Ian Duffy sharing his tips for making the Performance Panel less overwhelming. Yes, please!
  
• And when it comes time to talk about performance, Sander van Surksum explains why we should stop talking performance metrics to business leaders. Sander states that Performance isn’t a technical discipline. It’s a human one. Similarly to how Core Web Vitals were created to quantify the user experience so that we could track them numerically. But I often hear “Why do we need to improve this metric, it is already green?” Because, in the end, we shouldn’t be “trying to get a better score“, we should be “trying to create a better user experience.” So speak in that language. As Sander further says, We don’t fix metrics. We fix moments.

Speaking of happy users, Joseph Wynn shows off Speedcurve’s updated User Happiness metric, and explains why the time was right to update it. How happy are your users? :-)

Preethi Sam shows off two methods for toggling position: sticky to position: fixed on scroll.

View Transition is one of the most powerful new CSS features to become available in all modern browsers lately. But it has done so in stages, and those stages are not all supported across all browsers yet. So Stefan Judis walks us through how to use feature detection for specifically View Transition Types.

Link rot has been an issue on the web since shortly after there was a web… I remember wayback (pre-pun intended, you’ll get it shortly), I used to use a WP plugin called Broken Link Detector (I think?), that would scan my site’s outbound links and report back any that no longer worked. Then it was up to me to hunt them down and fix them. Well, a new WP plugin, from the good folks at the Internet Archive, called Wayback Machine Link Fixer (see, get it now???) automatically scans your post content… to detect outbound links… checks the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for an archived version and creates a snapshot if one isn’t available. The plugin also automatically updates the Archive with updates of your posts! Glad to see this is all happening as posts are saved, but that could still hog a bit of processing power for a wee bit, so buyer-beware…

Speaking of WordPress, Terence Eden shares a big list of things I disable in WordPress. Indeed, lots to love, and hate, about WordPress. That big list is going to take a little while to crawl through, though…

I am very passively, but attentively, watching Chris Ferdinandi as he constructs his Kelp UI. And a recent installment is his “switch” component. (Don’t be impatient like me, be sure to continue down to the final example before bothering to open one of his example links…) Like the look, love the accessibility!

Speaking of accessibility, Manuel Matuzović walks us through some dealbreaker bugs in native popovers. Shame, too, since it really is a drastic improvement over the old-school JS implementations…

Saron Yitbarek shares an easy way to style text fragments: ::target-text. Note, this is currently still Baseline Newly Available, but cool nonetheless, and it is a nice progressive enhancement!

And finally, it was quite a boost to my morale to have been included not once, not twice, but thrice this year amongst what I consider to be the crème de la crème in our little web community! All three were for the same project, my #NoLoJS “movement”:

1. First on the PerformanceObserver meetup,
2. then on the Web Performance Calendar,
3. and finally on the HTMHell Advent Calendar!
   

I am beyond honored to have been included with such luminaries! And I continue to slog away in any free time I can scrounge on a design library of sorts for these and many more such patterns/components, so stay tuned!

Happy reading, and may your new year bring you everything you wish for,
Atg

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