Best of HTML — December 2025

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    Article
    Avatar of unaUna Kravets·24w

    CSS Wrapped 2025

    Chrome 135 introduces Invoker Commands, allowing buttons to perform actions on dialogs and popovers declaratively using commandfor and command attributes, eliminating the need for JavaScript onclick handlers. The feature supports built-in commands like show-modal, close, and toggle-popover that mirror their JavaScript counterparts, plus custom commands prefixed with double dashes that can be handled via the toggle event. A polyfill is available for broader browser support.

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    Article
    Avatar of hnHacker News·22w

    Please Just Fucking Try HTMX

    HTMX offers a middle ground between raw HTML limitations and JavaScript framework complexity. By adding HTML attributes that trigger server requests and swap in HTML responses, you can build interactive web applications without the overhead of React, Vue, or Angular. A case study shows a company reduced their codebase by 67%, cut JavaScript by 90%, and improved performance by switching from React to HTMX. The approach works best for typical CRUD applications, dashboards, and forms rather than highly interactive apps like Google Docs. The core benefit is simplicity: no build tools, no state management libraries, just HTML attributes and server-side rendering.

  3. 3
    Article
    Avatar of collectionsCollections·24w

    freeCodeCamp Launches New JavaScript and Responsive Web Design Certifications

    freeCodeCamp launched three new certification programs covering JavaScript, Python, and Responsive Web Design. Each certification includes hundreds of hours of interactive content, five hands-on projects, and a 50-question proctored exam with anti-cheating measures. The programs cover core concepts like DOM manipulation and asynchronous JavaScript, Python data structures and algorithms, and responsive design with CSS Flexbox and Grid. All certifications are free, permanently valid, and don't require webcam or ID verification.

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    Video
    Avatar of codeheadCodeHead·21w

    The Fun Way To Learn Web Development

    Learning web development becomes engaging when you focus on building small, tangible projects rather than passively consuming tutorials. Project-based learning with constraints, sharing work publicly, and using AI as an experimentation tool rather than a copy-paste shortcut creates momentum. Consistency through 30-minute daily sessions compounds faster than marathon study sessions, making learning feel like a challenge rather than homework.

  5. 5
    Article
    Avatar of perfplanetcalWeb Performance Calendar·21w

    Revisiting HTML streaming for modern web performance

    HTML streaming allows servers to send HTML progressively rather than in one chunk, enabling browsers to render content as it arrives. HTMS is an experimental project that extends basic streaming with progressive placeholders that can be updated asynchronously within a single HTTP response. This approach delivers early First Contentful Paint, maintains SEO-friendly complete HTML documents, and achieves strong Lighthouse scores without client-side hydration. The technique works best combined with SSR, SSG, or tools like HTMX, though it introduces constraints around error handling once streaming begins and requires careful layout planning.

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    Article
    Avatar of css_tricksCSS-Tricks·25w

    Prevent a page from scrolling while a dialog is open

    Chrome 144 introduces a fix for preventing page scrolling when modal dialogs are open by extending overscroll-behavior to work on non-scrollable containers. By setting overscroll-behavior: contain on both the dialog element and body, and making the dialog a scroll container with overflow: hidden, developers can now solve this long-standing issue without JavaScript workarounds that previously required fixing body positioning.

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    Article
    Avatar of simonwillisonSimon Willison·23w

    JustHTML is a fascinating example of vibe engineering in action

    JustHTML is a pure Python HTML5 parser that passes all 9,200+ browser vendor tests and achieves 100% test coverage. The library was built over several months using AI coding agents (Claude Sonnet, Gemini Pro, Claude Opus) in VS Code, but with extensive human engineering oversight. The developer established the API design, integrated comprehensive test suites, built custom profilers and fuzzers, and made all architectural decisions while letting the AI handle code implementation. This represents "vibe engineering"—using AI agents professionally with proper code review, testing, and engineering practices—rather than "vibe coding" which produces unvetted prototypes. The project demonstrates how experienced engineers can leverage AI as a typing assistant while maintaining responsibility for design, quality, and architectural decisions.

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    Article
    Avatar of css_tricksCSS-Tricks·24w

    HTML Web Components Proposal From 1998

    Web components have roots dating back to a 1998 W3C proposal that introduced the concept of componentization for building applications using reusable building blocks. The proposal emphasized breaking down complex applications into manageable chunks without requiring deep understanding of internal implementation details. While often perceived as a recent feature, the idea of style encapsulation and component-based architecture has been evolving for nearly 30 years in web development history.

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    Article
    Avatar of nolanlawsonRead the Tea Leaves·23w

    The <time> element should actually do something

    The HTML `<time>` element was designed to semantically mark up dates and times with machine-readable datetime attributes, but browsers and assistive technologies don't actually do anything useful with it. Despite being used on roughly 8% of web pages, it remains largely inert beyond basic rendering. Search engines may use it for date snippets, though Google's documentation recommends Schema.org markup instead. The element represents an unfulfilled promise of semantic HTML—browsers could theoretically offer calendar integration, date localization, or enhanced accessibility features, but none have implemented such functionality.

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    Article
    Avatar of css_tricksCSS-Tricks·24w

    That Time I Tried Explaining HTML and CSS to My 5-Year Old Niece

    Teaching HTML and CSS to a five-year-old using a house-building analogy reveals fundamental insights about web development. HTML acts as the structural bricks that define what exists on a page, while CSS decorates those bricks with colors, sizes, and positioning. The exercise demonstrates how explaining basics forces developers to slow down and appreciate the foundational simplicity of web technologies, reminding us that beneath all the complexity, the web runs on straightforward building blocks.

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    Video
    Avatar of t3dotggTheo - t3․gg·21w

    CSS got WAY better in 2025

    Chrome shipped 22 new CSS and UI features in 2025, including customizable select elements, native popover and dialog controls, scroll-based animations, view transition improvements, and declarative UI patterns. Major additions include invoker commands for JavaScript-free interactions, anchor positioning with container queries, scroll state queries, tree counting functions for staggered animations, and the shape function for complex clipping paths. New text layout controls enable proper vertical centering, while DOM state-preserving moves keep video and iframe state during reparenting. Most features work in Chromium browsers but lack Firefox and Safari support.

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    Article
    Avatar of hnHacker News·24w

    I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam Website with Claude

    An engineer attempts to use Claude AI to recreate the iconic 1996 Space Jam website from screenshots and assets, but fails despite multiple approaches. The experiment reveals Claude's limitations in spatial reasoning and precise visual measurements. Despite providing grids, comparison tools, and zoomed images, Claude consistently produces inaccurate layouts while confidently claiming success. The author theorizes this stems from how vision models process images in 16x16 patches, losing fine-grained spatial detail. The piece documents the iterative debugging process, Claude's unreliable self-assessment, and the surprising difficulty of a seemingly simple HTML recreation task.

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    Video
    Avatar of oxylabsOxylabs·23w

    n8n Web Scraping: Complete Automation Guide

    n8n enables no-code web scraping through its visual workflow builder. The platform offers multiple approaches: basic HTTP Request and HTML nodes for static sites, Markdown conversion for AI processing, and third-party tools like Oxylabs AI Studio for JavaScript-heavy pages. Workflows can be configured with error handling, retry logic, and rate limiting. Scraped data integrates directly with databases, spreadsheets, and LLMs. Both cloud-hosted and self-hosted deployment options are available, with self-hosted being free but requiring infrastructure management.

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    Article
    Avatar of csstipCSS Tip·25w

    The Hidden Selectors of The HTML Element

    Explores alternative CSS selectors for targeting the HTML root element beyond the standard `html{}` and `:root{}`. Demonstrates lesser-known approaches including the nesting selector `&`, `:scope`, `:has(head)`, `:not(* *)`, and `:not(* > *)`. Explains how these selectors work by leveraging fallback behaviors and unique characteristics of the HTML element, such as being the only element without a parent or having head and body as children.

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    Article
    Avatar of codepenCodePen·24w

    Chris’ Corner: HTML

    Soft navigations is a new browser API term for SPA-style page changes that help measure Core Web Vitals. Google's influence over web standards extends to image formats, where WebP gets preferential treatment over JPEG XL. The download attribute on links only works for same-origin resources; cross-origin downloads require a Content-Disposition header. Duplicating HTML IDs breaks getElementById, hash links, ARIA attributes, and creates accessibility issues, making unique IDs a genuine best practice rather than arbitrary advice.

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    Article
    Avatar of rubylaRUBYLAND·24w

    De-emphasize scrollbars in small containers

    CSS provides scrollbar-color and scrollbar-width properties to customize scrollbar appearance in small containers like popovers. Setting scrollbar-color to lightgray transparent and scrollbar-width to thin creates a more subtle, de-emphasized scrollbar that doesn't dominate the UI.

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    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·21w

    The HTML Elements Time Forgot

    HTML has evolved significantly since 1993, leaving behind numerous obsolete elements that were once part of the standard. This exploration covers deprecated tags like <marquee>, <bgsound>, framesets, various code display elements (<xmp>, <listing>, <plaintext>), <spacer>, <keygen>, <nextid>, <isindex>, and <dir>. Each represented experiments in web development that addressed specific needs of their era, from background sounds and frame-based layouts to primitive search functionality and cryptographic key generation. While most are no longer supported or have modern equivalents, they illustrate how the web platform evolved through trial and error, with backward compatibility sometimes preserving these relics even after deprecation.

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    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·22w

    Please Just Fucking Try HTMX

    HTMX offers a middle ground between raw HTML limitations and JavaScript framework complexity. By adding HTML attributes that trigger server requests and swap in HTML responses, you can build interactive web apps without bundlers, state management, or massive dependencies. A case study shows a company reduced their codebase by 67% and improved performance by switching from React to HTMX. The approach works best for typical CRUD apps, dashboards, and forms—not highly interactive applications like Google Docs. The core idea: let the server return HTML fragments and use hypermedia architecture as originally intended.

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