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What can we expect from Interop 2025? How can you give your console.log statements more context()? Is using gifs generally a good idea?

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The browser makers came together and decided on the focus areas of Interop 2025.

And if you now think, "Oh well... again, new stuff!?", I get it. However, the features included in Interop aren't browser APIs working in a single browser for the next decade. The promise is that all browsers support the listed features this year. These Interop features are supposed to enter the web soon'ish. For realz.

The Interop focus areas this year include:

  • CSS anchor positioning
  • Core Web Vitals
  • ::details-content
  • import ... with { type: "json" }
  • CSS @scope
  • View Transitions
  • and many more things...

The "official Interop 2025 docs" are a good read, so check them out!

But what's the current state and where are we today?

Interop 2025 Dashboard showing that chromium is on a score 88 - 91, Firefox 52 and Safari at 55.

Unsurprisingly, Chromium is leading the way in terms of new features, but I expect that things will move fast.

I'm quite happy with Interop 2025, but if you're game for some critical thoughts, of course, Alex Russel never disappoints and shares some spicy takes.🌶️

Something that made me smile this week

GitHub contribution graph stickers forming the word "Fake Developer"

I resisted for over a year and didn't put stickers on my computer, but these are just too good!

Be a fake developer

New on the blog

Let's stop using animated gifs

Animated GIFs are everywhere you look: from social media and messaging services, to email and even on websites. So how do we use them accessibly? I’m afraid to say, the most accessible way to use animated GIFs is probably not to use them at all.

Oldie but goldie: Martin makes some good points against using animated gifs.

Reconsider

LCP !== LCP

Matt explaining LCP metrics

Did you know that not every element is considered a valid LCP element? Or are you aware that Chromium and Firefox evaluate the LCP elements differently? Matt explains the details.

Understand LCP

Why we should consider searchability

<a href="https://draft.community" aria-label="Slack">   <svg.../>   <span class="hidden-until-found" hidden="until-found">Slack</span> </a>

How do you search for things on a web page? You might CMD+f all the things. If you do, you've probably also encountered situations when a simple text search doesn't work.

Schepp explains how to make content findable for the built-in browser search and assistive technology using hidden="until-found" and some CSS trickery.

It's an excellent post, and I wonder if this approach will become a .sr-only class replacement.

Make things searchable

console.context()

// let's create a custom logger const myLogger = console.context('my-logger') myLogger.log('hello from my logger')

Today I learned that the Chromium console includes a context() method that allows you to create loggers, which you can easily filter in the JavaScript console.

Filter your logs

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The wonderful weird web – Floor796

Scene from Floor796

Floor796 is an absolute classic created in 2018, and the animated space station includes areas with a gazillion tiny details. The fun thing: the project is still being worked on and extended.

Discover things

Is AI hindering new tech adoption?

The cutoff means that models are strictly limited in knowledge up to a certain point. For instance, Anthropic’s latest models have a cutoff of April 2024, and OpenAI’s latest models have cutoffs of late 2023.

I'm really trying to lean into some AI coding features, but with all these new browser features shipping daily, I would be lying if I said I'm not concerned about the AI knowledge cut-off.

Be aware of the new stuff

Speculation rules on google.com

{ "prefetch": \[{ "source": "list", "requires": \[ "anonymous-client-ip-when-cross-origin"\], "referrer_policy": "strict-origin", "urls": \[ "https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/test", "https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/test" \]}\] }

You might have heard of the Chromium-only Speculation Rules. They're supposed to be a prefetch / prerender alternative.

I learned that Google Search ships them in production, and their implementation includes many tips and tricks about things to consider. I mean look at this snippet, "anonymous-client-ip-when-cross-origin", what? 🤯

Speculate

A 💙 for CSS grid

An extensive definition of grid-template-areas.

I just love it when I see CSS grids being used for more than putting columns next to each other.

Power up your grids

A massive Node.js ecosystem update

This change means that when Node.js 18 reaches end-of-life (EOL) in April 2025, library maintainers can finally drop their CJS builds and ship ESM-only packages with confidence.

This news might only be important for package maintainers, but after all these years of dancing the endless CommonJS vs ECMAScript modules dance, it's finally time to embrace modules.

Node.js 20 and higher versions can now require ECMAScript modules, which means that when Node.js 18 reaches the end of life in April, everybody can drop all these build steps compiling multiple module systems and "just ship" modules.

Go all-in with modules

Random MDN – Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY

function checkNumber(bigNumber) {   if (bigNumber === Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY) {     return "Process number as Infinity";   }   return bigNumber; }

From the unlimited MDN knowledge archive...

Here's one of the many famous JavaScript quirks: did you know there's a static data property called POSITIVE_INFINITY? Now you do.

Discover infinity

TIL recap – media query boolean contexts

@media screen and (prefers-contrast) { }

Here's a trick question: what values will be matched for the prefers-contrast media feature query when you omit the value and use the so called "boolean context"?

Query features!

Find more short web development learnings in my "Today I learned" section.

New on the baseline — Styling scrollbars

Demo showing the scrollbar styling options

Short'n'sweet: if styling the scrollbar is your jam, scrollbar-color and scrollbar-width work across modern browsers now!

Be on brand

Three valuable projects to have a look at

A new Tiny Helper

Video Compressor — Compress videos right in the browser by up to 90% for free. No upload needed.

Addy continues his tooling journey! There are now a tool to remove backgrounds from images, a tool to compress images and the newest member — a tool to compress videos.

Compress your videos

Find more single-purpose online tools on tiny-helpers.dev.

Thought of the week

In the spirit of the web platform, here's some wisdom from Harry:

Every layer of abstraction made in the browser moves you further from the platform, ties you further into framework lock-in, and moves you further away from fast.

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About Stefan Judis

Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.

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