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...

Just found another use case for ChatGPT: Getting spoilers in a controlled way while avoiding spoilers I never asked for, as often happens with searches. My prompt was “Without giving me spoilers without my consent (besides what I’m asking you about) can you tell me [question]”. Worked like a charm!

🔥Hot take: Animated gifs are basically muted videos and should be allowed in <video>

Another day, another weird print-related #ChromeBug I actually reported it this time: issues.chromium.org/issues/43489...

I also miss the free Web, and still give away a ton of my work. BUT if you idealize free labor yet understand that people need $$ to live, the obvious corollary is that they should relegate their passions to hobbies and do something else for survival. [1/2]

We recently got a Roomba for the first time. So far, its primary advantage has been getting our 6 year old to pick up her toys from the floor so that the robot doesn’t eat them. Natural consequences 😂

Please let the owner be the cat. Please let the owner be the cat.

I get why some #AI companies need to resort to usage-based pricing, but from a user-centered perspective, it’s completely nonsensical. Let me explain. 🧵

Lovely UX touch from ChatGPT: Holding down Cmd brings up a cheatsheet of keyboard shortcuts. Help that is there when it’s needed and out of the way when it’s not. Compare that to the common (anti)pattern where users must memorize a specific keyboard shortcut to bring this up (does anyone?).

🚀 The #StateOfHTML 2025 survey is now open! ➡️ Take it now: survey.devographics.com/en-US/survey... 💡 Spending time to fill these out is an investment into your craft, as browsers are using the results to make prioritization decisions. You don't have to do it in one sitting (or even one device).

Study finds A.I. LLMs advise women to ask for lower salaries than men. When prompted w/ a user profile of same education, experience & job role, differing only by gender, ChatGPT advised the female applicant to request $280K salary; Male applicant=$400K. thenextweb.com/news/chatgpt...

:state() is a great mechanism for matching elements without having to tweak their DOM. What if we could expand it to… …regular elements? github.com/whatwg/html/... …selectors (as an alias)? github.com/w3c/csswg-dr...

If you could dynamically mirror HTML content in multiple places (e.g. like a <use> for HTML), what would you use it for?

What would you call a piece of code that implements a proposed web standard, but with different syntax? E.g. it may use… - CSS custom properties instead of the proposed properties - HTML custom elements instead of the proposed element names - a regular CSS class instead of a proposed pseudo-class

Quick pulse check as @sachagreif.com and I finalize #StateOfHTML: If you were presented with this question in a survey: a) Do you know which options to check or would you be confused? b) Are there any options you'd personally need to enter but are missing? (this post may self-destruct tomorrow…)

There’s a nonzero chance you will die from a cancer that could have been curable because people who couldn’t pass 7th grade biology and are scared of things like “mRNA” and “riboflavin” and “walkable cities” decided to make their ignorance everybody else’s problem

Just finished taking this year’s #StateOfCSS! It was quite funny that there were CSS features I had designed where I had to select "Heard of it" because *technically* I haven't used them yet. 😅 If you plan to take it, do it now, it's closing very soon: stateofcss.com/en-US

Honestly, as a European, it’s baffling how lobbying is accepted as normal in the States. In any other country, that’s called corruption.

🔥 I have news! After a 1y hiatus, I’m once again leading this year’s #StateOfHTML survey, thanks to generous funding by Google. ❤️ 🙋🏽‍♀️ Is there is an HTML feature or Web API you're dying to see progress on? Suggest it and it could be included! [1/2] lea.verou.me/blog/2025/de...

Jake points out some excellent UX issues with footnotes on the Web. But let's not throw the 👶 out with the 🛁! Footnotes add tertiary context for invested readers. All alternatives are way more prominent & harder to ignore. But they definitely need some UX love to work well on the Web. [1/4]

TIL people want to use gene editing to eliminate ADHD and ASD. Gene editing ethics aside, what a shortsighted view. Historically, most people that push humanity forwards have been neurodivergent, esp ASD, ADHD, and frequently both. [1/2]

At the start of the AI revolution, human communication patterns set the tone. Requests as questions, please, thank you… Whatever was common in one’s culture. Over time, we got curt; it's faster and the AI doesn't care. So we are forming new, AI-specific communication patterns! Fascinating. [1/2]

🔥 [New blog post!] The Hovercar Framework for Deliberate Product Design lea.verou.me/blog/2025/ho... How, paradoxically, explicitly fleshing out the ideal solution to a product problem (The North Star UI) can end up *both* saving time and frustration *and* improving the product. #productdesign

“Female” and “woman” are now banned words in USA research grants. “‘I guess a word that's not on here is “men,”and I guess a word that I don't see on here is “white,” so I guess we'll see what's going on with white men and what they need,’ Fielding-Miller said.”

I set out to announce two web components I wrote for displaying @bsky.app likes and ended up ranting about how painful it is to build accessible, localizable web components in 2025. The components are still there, though — lucky you? lea.verou.me/blog/2025/bl...

What is the use case for websites providing their own dark mode toggles? When do users need to set a mode that is different than what their OS? I’m not questioning the existence of use cases, just trying to understand them.

Fave recent micro-productivity hack: aliasing ⌘T to New Tab to the Right via OSX settings¹ 1. Makes tab groups work properly for isolating work 2. Eliminates the spatial disconnect of having to hunt a newly opened tab down in a different part of the UI Thank me later :) ¹ superuser.com/a/1627227

I just realized why high-functioning #ADHD folks make such great PMs & entrepreneurs. We spend years building systems to overcome our own executive dysfunction: frameworks, principles, data etc. Imagine climbing with boulders strapped to your waist — mastering technique is your only hope. [1/2]

New blog post: Construction Lines I turned 39 today. My career turns 20 this summer. Prompted by a recent career shift, I paused to reflect; and ask myself “What has brought me the most joy — and why?” lea.verou.me/blog/2025/co...

I keep finding myself rewording text to remove em dashes, because some people use them as a proxy to filter out AI-generated content. Mute em dashes, block AI bots — and typography nerds. What surreal times we live in.

Calling AI "fancy autocomplete" is not the put-down you think it is. It’s like saying that Human Intelligence (HI? 😅) is just "electrical signals between neurons" as means to discredit it. Yes, so? Nothing looks sophisticated if you zoom in enough. It’s about the result, not how it’s implemented.

“If you thought CSS was programing, it’s still programming, with even more features. If you didn’t think CSS was programming, it’s still not programming, but with more features” - @miriam.codes #CSSDay

Couldn’t make it to #CSSDay this year and I’m having huge FOMO. Have fun everyone! Eat a bitterbal for me too! 🥹

Related to this: I believe setting the Light or Dark preference on a site should be a browser feature, instead of requiring each site to implement their own Dark Mode Toggle Button.

It’s not new but I just discovered this @theoatmeal.bsky.social post and I think it may well be my favorite of his. “Sometimes going down the wrong path isn’t a mistake — it’s a construction line” Amen to that! theoatmeal.com/comics/creat...

The 2025 State of CSS survey is now open! survey.devographics.com/en-US/survey...