Jaaaaaaaaaa 💪🎉

This was a huge amount of work for everybody involved, with @lea.verou.me staying up so late to work on this that she more or less ended up matching my own work hours despite living on the opposite side of the globe… So I hope you enjoy the results! 2025.stateofhtml.com/en-US/

It took a while (mainly due to the huge quantity of data collected on some questions!), but the #StateOfHTML 2025 survey results are now live! 2025.stateofhtml.com/en-US/ Big thanks to @lea.verou.me who not only designed the original survey back in 2023, but then came back this year to update it.

Preach! 🎤 I love karaoke and hear this a lot, often as a self-deprecating joke. I get not joining if you don’t like singing. But it’s so sad to like singing and not join because of this. Karaoke is about having fun, not skill! Anyone who criticizes a karaoke performance simply doesn’t get karaoke.

🔥 Hot take: dashed borders should never be used as a design system default. Dashed lines tend to indicate that something is removable or not quite there. Using them as decoration is as confusing as making text blue and underlined as a stylistic choice. Pictures: dashed borders used correctly

Just saw a Parkland survivor post about being on lock down at Brown University. We've failed generations of kids with our gun fetish

💡 Life hack: I open browser tabs to get myself to do unpleasant/boring tasks. E.g. - I need to contact customer service, I’ll open a tab with the company’s website. - I need to file taxes, I’ll open the tax filing app - I need to send an invoice, I’ll open my invoicing app Who else does this?

Happy Baseline newly available day for CSS @scope now that it's in Firefox 146!

Trump’s Deportations Are Ripping Mothers from Their Babies open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

”What’s wrong with build tools? Other languages are compiled!” Yes, but their compiler is official and always there. The #JS ecosystem has devolved into a state where abstraction, the most fundamental software engineering concept, has been outsourced to third party tooling. *That’s* the problem.

You need to install the `es6-string-html` extension in VS Code for the `/* html */` syntax highlighting to work. marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemNa...

💡 TIL: You can highlight a JS template tag as another language by prepending it with a comment like /* html */ in at least VS Code and editors wrapping it like Cursor. How did I find out? Cursor suggested it when I tried to do a more convoluted const html = String.raw; const template = html`…

Appception: British Airways’s app using a WebView to embed their website, which recommends installing the app I’m already on 😅

I’m often asked for freelance UI/UX designer recommendations, but my list is out of date — most folks I used to refer are now full-time or doing other work. Time to fix that. If you’re an independent UI/UX designer doing hands-on client work, drop your website/portfolio! DM/email fine too. [1/2]

November 30 is #BlueBeanieDay, supporting web standards and accessibility, the building blocks empowering a people-first web. Remember how good that web felt? It still does. Join us! Pop on a blue beanie and smile.

Just a reminder that what seems obvious now may not seem obvious in two weeks. Be better than past Lea. 🫠

When looking at results from web development surveys (e.g. #StateofHTML), what are you looking for when looking at the data? What conclusions are you trying to draw?

That it should be a fundamental human right to live in whatever country you want, no questions asked. The existence of borders causes far more suffering than any benefit they provide.

🔥 Live from TPAC: Native routing coming to the web platform! First step was URLPattern. Next is matching routes in CSS¹ Then naming them and using these high-level names in HTML, CSS, JS. Exciting stuff. ¹ See CSS WG issue 12594 (not linking to avoid too much noise)

At the CSS WG meeting, we're discussing possibly natively doing fit-text in CSS. Send us your use cases (with screenshots/links)! Do you ever need to fit multi-line text? Do you ever need to fit non-text inline elements (e.g. icons)? Do you adjust font-size, letter-spacing, or both?

Have you ever avoided using an a11y feature because of issues involved with IDREFs being global, or encountered bugs due to this? Please let us know! We have a meeting to discuss this next Wednesday (at TPAC) and would love to hear your stories, especially if they impacted users. cc @lea.verou.me

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 😀