Six threads, one craft.
Everything we publish falls into one of six threads. Each thread below comes with the current, verifiable state of that corner of the platform, with sources, plus the best places to start reading.
Modern CSS
The last few years turned CSS from a styling language into a layout and logic language. Selectors can now look down and up the tree, components can respond to their container instead of the viewport, and nested grids finally share tracks. The 2025 State of CSS survey, the community's largest annual snapshot, concluded that :has(), container queries and subgrid have "moved from wish lists to everyday practice."
:has() is both the most-used and the most-loved feature in the survey. The "parent selector" is now table stakes.
of respondents have used container size queries at least once. That is production adoption, not curiosity.
State of CSS 2025awareness of container queries, up from 81% in 2024. The knowledge gap is closing fast.
State of CSS 2025Motion & Interaction
Motion is a design decision, not a decoration, and for the first time, the platform gives designers real physics without JavaScript. The linear() timing function models springs and bounces, @starting-style unlocks entry transitions, and scroll-driven animations move the whole "animate on scroll" genre off the main thread and onto the compositor.
Chrome shipped scroll-driven animations unflagged in version 115, back in July 2023. Blink has had three years of runway.
Chrome for DevelopersSafari 26 (September 2025) brought scroll and view timelines to WebKit, with threaded scroll animations landing in 26.4.
WebKit blogglobal support in mid-2026. Firefox stable still gates the feature behind a flag, and it is a named Interop 2026 focus area.
caniuse · Interop 2026Design Systems
A design system is a shared language between design and engineering; tokens are its vocabulary. The W3C Design Tokens Community Group's format module now gives that vocabulary a portable JSON standard, so the same tokens can flow from Figma to CSS custom properties to native platforms. Meanwhile, container style queries promise components that theme themselves, though the data shows we're early.
of State of CSS 2025 respondents have used @container style queries: high interest, low adoption, limited support. Watch this space.
The Design Tokens Format Module standardizes token JSON across tools, published by the W3C Design Tokens Community Group.
tr.designtokens.orgOur house methodology: primitive → semantic → component token layers, so re-brands touch values, never meaning.
design-profilerAccessibility
The numbers stay stubborn: WebAIM's annual audit of the top one million home pages keeps finding the same handful of failures, year after year. The encouraging flip side: because the failures are so concentrated, a design engineer who fixes contrast, labels, alt text and heading structure leaps ahead of most of the web. That's exactly the ground our accessibility thread covers.
of the top 1,000,000 home pages had low-contrast text failures in the February 2026 audit, an average of 34 instances per page, and still the #1 issue.
WebAIM Million 2026of all detected errors fall into just six categories, the same six for seven straight years. Fix those, fix most of the web.
WebAIM Million 2026of home pages had detectable WCAG 2 A/AA failures in the 2025 audit, averaging 51 errors per page.
WebAIM Million 2025SVG & Canvas
Vector graphics aren't a library feature. They have been native to the web for over two decades. SVG gives you resolution-independent, styleable, accessible graphics that live in the DOM; Canvas gives you a raw pixel surface for when you need thousands of moving parts. Our thread covers both, from hand-drawn <path> tricks to data-driven visualization.
SVG 1.1 became a W3C Recommendation; vector graphics have been first-class on the web for more than 20 years.
W3C SVG 1.1Retained-mode SVG (DOM, CSS-styleable, accessible) vs. immediate-mode Canvas (fast, scriptable pixels). Choosing well is half the craft.
MDN · SVGThe Craft
Some things don't fit in a spec: why one shadow feels cheap and another feels expensive, why a modular type scale reads calmer, why "as little design as possible" is harder than it sounds. This thread is where we write about taste, the judgment calls that separate an interface that works from one that feels right.
Dieter Rams' ten principles of good design, ending with "good design is as little design as possible", remain the sharpest checklist we know.
Vitsœ · Good design"The details are not the details. They make the design." Charles Eames's line is the founding sentiment of this journal.
Eames Office