Feature.js

A (kind of) farewell to the web – Web Directions

We’ve arrived at an industrialised process, one that’s like an assembly line for applications. Frameworks like React have become the machinery of that assembly line. They enable us to build efficiently, to build at scale, to build predictably. But they also constrain what we build.

But what aren’t we building? What new kinds of experiences, what new kinds of applications, what new kinds of interaction could we create if we were deeply exploring and engaging with the capabilities of the platform? I don’t know, because we’re not building them. We’re building what the frameworks enable us to build, what the assembly line can produce efficiently.

Collectively, as an industry and as a profession, consciously or not, we’ve chosen this maxima that we’re stuck on. We can build what React or Vue or Next or name your framework/library enables us to do.

I share John’s despair at this situation, but I don’t share his belief that large language models will save us.

Interop Feature Ranking

This is a nifty initiative:

This site lets you rank the proposals you care about, giving us data we can use when reviewing which proposals should be taken on for 2026.

For the record, here’s my top ten:

1. Cross-document view transitions
2. Speculation Rules API
3. img sizes="auto" loading="lazy"
4. Customizable/stylable select
5. Invoker commands
6. Interoperable rendering of HTML fieldset/legend
7. Web Share API
8. CSS scroll-driven animations
9. CSS accent-color property
10. CSS hanging-punctuation property

JavaScript dos and donts @ Mu-An Chiou

Straightforward smart sensible advice that you can apply to any feature on a website.

WebKit Features in Safari 17.2 | WebKit

Lots of new features landing in Safari, and it’s worth paying attention to the new icon requirements now that websites can be added to the dock:

To provide the best user experience on macOS, supply at least one opaque, full-bleed maskable square icon in the web app manifest, either as SVG (any size) or high resolution bitmap (1024×1024).

12 Days of Web

All twelve are out, and all twelve are excellent deep dives into exciting web technologies landing in browsers now.