If it were possible to make elements focusable and give them ARIA roles via CSS, what would you use it for?

🔥 Hot take: I wonder if the Web’s Separation of Concerns should be about the Web platform *supporting* authors in being able to separate concerns in whatever way works for them, rather than forcing a specific type of separation dreamed up in the late 90s. 🤔 (*ducks to avoid objects thrown* 😅)

TIL: Apparently, a web component’s lifecycle hooks are picked up by customElements.define() when it’s registered, and overwriting them after makes no difference whatsoever. Demo: codepen.io/leaverou/pen...

An underrated perk of AI autocomplete is that it offers a fascinating aggregated glimpse into real-world developer habits. Sometimes it’s “oh, that’s clever! Better than what I was going to do!” Other times “Why would anyone do that? And often enough for the model to learn it?!” (e.g. return await)

The #JS utility you never knew you needed 😂 Create multiple Symbols in one go with this Proxy-based one liner.

In today’s episode of Useless Info I just learned about #JS: Turns out you cannot subclass Proxy (because it has no prototype). Nice try Lea 🥲

Your ability to eat should not depend on your productivity Your ability to get healthcare should not depend on your productivity Your ability to get housing should not depend on your productivity Saying “be more productive!” To those who are struggling devalues human life. It aids fascism.

After years of internalizing that JS proxies are suuuper slow, I was surprised to find that in Chrome, they seem faster for running function side effects than simply wrapping a function: jsbenchmark.com#eyJjYXNlcyI6...

#JS folks, what have you needed JS class mixins/traits for? Especially interested in use cases outside of Web Components (I already have plenty around WC)

When your context menu has this many options, it's time rethink your overall #UI

Played a bit with the SpeechRecognition API 🤩 Here’s my playground: codepen.io/leaverou/pen... Safari claims to support it, but I couldn't get it to recognize any non-English language. Can you? Also, it seems *exceedingly* slow. Like 5-6 seconds from the moment you stop speaking.

i NEED to know the backstory here

Having poured my soul into open source since 2008, I was nodding hard at @cory.laviska.com’s post. “It's all take and no give. And I've already given more than enough for two lifetimes.” There’s something especially irritating in watching companies profit off your work without contributing a dime.

🌈 Color.js is growing so much, we had to automate updating the millions of npm downloads counter in its readme. Currently at 84M total / 3M per week. 🤩 Speaking of, v0.6.0-beta.1 is fresh out the oven! github.com/color-js/col... Aiming for a stable next week if no issues 🤞🏼

Hey for those of you who don’t have kids, pls know that until recently, schools had stopped teaching phonics for decades. The substitute method sold to districts everywhere was, & I’m not kidding: “Just look at the word & take a guess!” OH WHY CAN’T THE CHILDREN READ? SURELY IT IS THEIR OWN FAULT!

LLMs are the best for getting to 80% of what you want to achieve, and the absolute worst for getting to 100% of what you want to achieve.

Honored to be awarded “Pathfinder for Standards” by @openjsf.org at #jsconf 💛 Blurb made me blush ☺️: “Lea is a rare person who has strong academic credentials, has helped create rigorous industry standards, but always focuses on the needs of real world users […]” Rest at openjsf.org/blog/javascr...

Scary.

I’m in love with this flexible date selector by kiwi.com 😍 It really drives home the point that good #UX is about accommodating user intent, not conserving clicks. Clicking on the more common "±N days" is faster, but is it always a better experience? [1/2]

Yay! This was one of my proposals and I think it has a ton of potential to revolutionize how we use design tokens in components and UI libraries today.

I’m in love with @sarahedo.bsky.social’s hand-drawn illustrations in her #jsconf slides 😍 Great talk too, I dig the high-level overview of how different platforms do UI, that’s exactly the kind of cross-pollination we need to design better APIs for the Web.

Very annoyed at Slack rn. It quietly decided to stop syncing DAYS AGO for no apparent reason so I missed a ton of messages 😒 Plus, all the messages *I* sent were never sent, and just vanished when I restarted the app. 😒 Silver lining: turns out people weren't suddenly all ghosting me in unison 😅

it's kinda weird that all the software i am expected to use for work are all written by distributed teams, go, python, postgres, linux, chrome, k8s etc and despite being told "the best teams work in an office together" i don't know of any software i use that's actually written that way

✈️ I was puzzled why so many delays and cancellations so I made the mistake of googling it and now I’m terrified. 😰

#JSConf ✈️ Flying Southwest for my 1st time and so far it’s been like a Windows progress bar: Boarding at 3:20! Oops, it’s actually 6:48! Oh nvm, it's 3:55 In other news, if you’re also going to @jsconf.bsky.social , looking forward to seeing you! Come say hi, even if we haven’t met before!

😍 Great idea, made by the awesome @jakearchibald.com. Spend a few minutes to select and rank what matters to you and improve the web platform for everyone!

You probably know that designing for accessibility benefits everyone, but you’re probably thinking of physical disabilities. But it can hold even more true for cognitive disabilities! UIs with low demands for sustained attention may help ADHD folks more, but it they are less taxing for everyone.

The Web is the platform you are looking for. Pass it on.

Make PWAs! Then no App Store can shut you up 😀

We believe healthcare is a right for every American. But starting today, millions of people will be notified that they are being priced out of their insurance thanks to Republican policies. Enough is enough. The GOP may shut down the government, but we will stand tall for YOU.

Apropos of nothing, Netlify is a pretty cool place to move your Vercel sites. front-end.social/@mayank/1134...

Vercel ➝ Netlify migration made simple. ✅ Checklist ✅ Next.js tips ✅ Best practices Start here → docs.netlify.com/resources/ch...

🔥 New blog post! Covering, among other things: - Why making simple things easy and complex things possible is not enough - How to maximize your UI’s signal-to-noise ratio - Why you can’t uncover friction through user feedback - How to prioritize user needs lea.verou.me/blog/2025/us...

The recent commotion around Tylenol and autism reminded me how many neurotypicals are so uninformed about neurodivergence they think neurodivergent conditions (autism, ADHD, OCD etc) are some sort of plague that you can catch if you’re not careful enough.

I like Aegean Airlines but their "40% discount for children" is a scam. tl;dr: The "40% off" is based on a fake inflated fare. The effective discount is 14% for 1 adult + 1 child, 0% for 2 adults + 1 child, and actually increases for adult:children ratios > 2:1 with no opt-out. An exposé. [1/7]

Computing some preliminary analysis over the #StateOfHTML pain points data and some …interesting patterns are emerging 🙃

mekka makes the hard financial case for free universal child care surprise! like every social program, it’s profitable for society and not just because it’s “nice”

So, if trans people committed mass shootings as often as cis people, you'd expect to have had about 52 of them since 2015. But instead, 5. Trans people are literally 10 times safer than cis people.

OTOH, I’ve been *incredibly* impressed with Gemini Pro for qualitative data classification (coding) tasks. Best of every LLM I’ve tried for this by far. The weirdest part is it often does a stellar job at the actual data analysis (the hard bit!), then draws the line at producing a valid CSV file. 🙃

Trying out ChatGPT Pro. It reminds me of some overconfident dudes I’ve worked with. If you read its own commentary about what its doing, you expect to be floored by the quality of its results. Then you look at the actual output and you’re like …that was it? That’s what all the fuss was about?

Despite leading this year’s #StateOfHTML survey, I procrastinated in typical me fashion and submitted my response in the last few hours — I had to beg @sachagreif.com to leave it open for just a little longer 🫣 If you’re like me, here’s the link: survey.devographics.com/en-US/survey...

This is excellent. 👌🏼 “Open source, the thing that drives the world, the thing Harvard says has an economic value of $8.8 trillion. Most of it is one person. And I can promise you not one of those single person projects have the amount of resources they need” opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-...

I keep hitting this: How to add reactive templating to part of the page in a way that doesn't drive a steamroller through the DOM? @vuejs.org is my current go-to, but it recreates elements, which doesn't play nice with libraries not made for it and makes it fail badly when there's an error. [1/3]

🎉 Live from the CSS WG F2F: Resolved to adopt my proposal for a new @supports-query rule (name TBD) to test entire blocks of CSS and reuse feature queries! And to make me co-editor of the spec 😀 Interested in moving this forwards? Contact me for funding this work! github.com/w3c/csswg-dr...

Yesterday I found myself asking ChatGPT for advice for how to structure my prompt to get better results from another LLM. Have I now reached peak AI or what 🫠

🎉 Live from the CSS WG F2F: RESOLVED: Make the color interpolation space of color-mix() to OKLab This means you'll no longer have to type color-mix(in oklab, color1, color2), just color-mix(color1, color2)

⚠️ Last chance to fill out #StateOfHTML 2025 and get browsers to pay attention to your web platform pain points! After popular demand, the survey closing date has been extended for a few more days so that returning OOO folks get a chance to fill it out too! survey.devographics.com/en-US/survey...

To add to @bram.us's question: What "queries" would you use it with? E.g. - first input descendant - closest name=foo sibling - input within the same <tr> etc Don't think just <label for>/ARIA but all attributes that take ids, e.g. list, commandfor, popovertarget + component attributes

In case you felt bad for not getting a perfect score on css-questions.com, I just got 55 / 60 and I’m in the CSS WG 😅 There were a couple inaccuracies but overall pretty well done. #cssquestions

🚨 #StateofHTML 2025 closing in a few days! If you’ve been planning to take it but putting it off, now’s the time: survey.devographics.com/en-US/survey...