<p><strong>TLDR:</strong> A developer shipped a fully playable DOOM renderer where CSS handles all rendering and JavaScript only runs the game loop. Separately, Pretext — a library for measuring text height without DOM reads — landed with a set of demos showing what’s now possible for masonry, virtualization, and complex editorial layouts. Vercel’s json-render hit 13k stars since January. Storybook 10 is moving to ESM-only and dropping Webpack.</p>
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<h2>DOOM rendered entirely in CSS</h2>
<p>Niels Leenheer built a playable DOOM renderer where every wall, floor, sprite, and enemy is a <code>&lt;div&gt;</code> positioned with CSS 3D transforms. JavaScript touches nothing except the game loop. The implementation leans on trig functions in CSS (<code>hypot</code>, <code>atan2</code>, <code>sin</code>, <code>cos</code>), <code>@property</code> for animatable custom properties, <code>clip-path</code> with <code>shape()</code> for irregular polygon floors, and anchor positioning for the HUD. There’s a pure-CSS culling hack using type-grinding, and the post documents real browser bugs hit in both Safari and Chrome along the way. Worth reading just for the depth-sorting section.</p>
<h2>Pretext: text layout without DOM reflow</h2>
<p>Cheng Lou released Pretext, a JS/TS library that measures multiline text height using the browser’s font engine via Canvas instead of touching the DOM. The API splits a one-time preparation pass (segmentation, bidi handling, measurement) from a cheap arithmetic layout pass, which means no reflow in the hot path. It handles mixed-bidi text and emojis, supports variable-width line routing for flowing text around floated elements, and outputs to Canvas, SVG, or WebGL. The demos include masonry layouts, accordion sections, and obstacle-aware title routing — all without a single DOM read during layout.</p>
<h2>Storybook 10 goes ESM-only</h2>
<p>The Storybook team posted a retrospective on the tool’s performance evolution. The headline changes: Webpack is out, Vite is in, lazy loading is on by default, and Storybook 10 will be ESM-only. Component Story Format 3 moved to static exports so the framework can analyze stories server-side without executing user code — a meaningful win for large codebases. The team also grew from 3 to 8 engineers, which explains the pace of recent releases.</p>
<h2>Vercel’s json-render hits 13k stars</h2>
<p>Vercel open-sourced json-render in January 2026 — a framework that lets AI models generate structured UIs directly from natural language prompts. It’s at 13,000 GitHub stars and 200 releases in roughly three months. No deep technical breakdown in the post, but the traction is hard to ignore if you’re thinking about AI-driven UI generation.</p>
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<h2>Also notable</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>Google Stitch 2.0</strong> introduces a <code>design.md</code> file for consistent design system context across AI agent handoffs, with MCP integration for Claude Code and Shad CN component export.</li>
<li><strong>Domscribe</strong> is an open-source tool that gives AI coding agents live DOM snapshots and source-file resolution via build-time AST transforms and framework adapters for React, Vue, Next.js, and Nuxt — zero production impact, MIT licensed.</li>
<li><strong>StreamDB</strong> wraps a Durable Stream with Standard Schema to give AI/agentic apps a reactive, type-safe database with sub-millisecond reactivity via differential dataflow and built-in optimistic mutations.</li>
<li><strong>Draggable image track parallax</strong> component ships at ~2 KB with zero dependencies, using the Web Animations API to animate both track transform and <code>object-position</code> simultaneously on the compositor thread.</li>
<li><strong>React Native game shipping</strong> — a developer shipped a mobile game using React Native, Expo, Reanimated, and Skia with 2,000 active players; the main pain point was managing React’s rerender cycles, not the animation layer.</li>
<li><strong>Next.js 15 caching</strong> — a reminder that Next.js 15 flipped the default caching behavior to off, which catches people coming from tutorials written against earlier versions.</li>
<li><strong>Vite feedback frustration</strong> — a brief but pointed post from a developer who says they’ve repeatedly regretted giving feedback to the Vite project and are stopping; no specifics, but the sentiment is worth noting given Vite’s central role in the ecosystem.</li>
</ul>


Frontend development news, CSS techniques, framework updates, and browser API changes.

Web Digest

A developer built a fully playable DOOM renderer using only CSS for rendering (3D transforms, trig functions, clip-path, anchor positioning) with JavaScript limited to the game loop. Pretext, a new JS/TS library, enables measuring multiline text height via Canvas instead of DOM reads, enabling reflow-free masonry, virtualization, and complex editorial layouts. Storybook 10 is going ESM-only, dropping Webpack in favor of Vite, and adopting lazy loading by default. Vercel's json-render framework for AI-driven UI generation hit 13k GitHub stars in three months. Also covered: Google Stitch 2.0 with design.md for AI agent handoffs, a DOM snapshot tool for AI coding agents, a reactive type-safe StreamDB, and notes on Next.js 15 caching defaults.

CSS-rendered DOOM ships, Pretext unlocks DOM-free text layout