An ongoing firehose of the latest 10 things we’re reading from around the web that we find interesting. Subscribe to the feed.
Mine did. Like this: so meta. I guess WordPress 7.0 assumes you are using a theme.json file these days. I’m not doing that yet on any of the sites I work on. If you want to embrace that future, you could add a theme.json file to the root of your…
May 20, 2026
LLemdashes
It was only a matter of time before I caught a stray — you know, considering. I know this is gonna sound a little navel-gazesque from the jump, but yesterday I had something I’d written dismissed as the “work” of an LLM. According to their comment, the reader saw a…
May 25, 2026
Maybe Don’t Rely on Google’s “Modern Web Guidance”
Just in time for Google I/O, the Chrome for Developers site announced Modern Web Guidance (MWG): Modern Web Guidance is a set of evergreen and expert-vetted skills that guide your AI coding agents across many common use cases to build modern web experiences that are accessible, performant, and secure. Build…
May 14, 2026
When to use (and not use) CSS shorthand properties
Ana Tudor posted about this recently and I agree: CSS shorthand properties are genuinely useful, but they’re not universally applicable. There are no hard and fast rules here. The question to ask yourself isn’t “can I shorthand this?” but “will someone reading this later, including future me, understand what’s happening?”…
May 12, 2026
Repeating Square Dots Backgrounds in CSS
I saw this reasonable ask for help the other day. Post by @[email protected] View on Mastodon Note that the example above has little circular dots, and what Paweł is asking about are little square dots. This is the example look from atproto.com: Repeating a Small Area My first thought is we’re obviously not drawing…
May 7, 2026
Lazy and Prompt
Chrome 148 shipped this week, and in the release notes you’ll find one of the best things to happen to web performance in a long time: loading="lazy" for <video> and <audio> elements. Scott Jehl, an engineer at Squarespace focusing on performance and accessibility, has been the driving force behind this….
April 29, 2026
Do graphs and charts need to be accessible?
Everything should be accessible. Or should it? Charts and graphs are a great example of where you can make something accessible, but maybe you shouldn’t. Bear with me here. Pie charts, line graphs, bar and column charts (let’s just call them all ‘charts’ for ease) are really useful, visual ways…
April 23, 2026
What would a 2026 CSS Anthology look like?
In 2004 I published the first edition of The CSS Anthology with Sitepoint. The idea for the book was to take the entire CSS 2.1 specification, and come up with 101 examples to show people how to use all of the CSS that existed. I have a copy on my…
Although I feel deeply conflicted, I’ve been using AI coding tools more often to speed up particular aspects of development. Recently, I added an AGENTS.md to my setup so I don’t need to repeat my preferences. Judge Dredd. Robot Wars. 2000AD comic. I started using ChatGPT and DeepSeek to help…
March 30, 2026
Pretext review
This weekend a project called pretext started making waves by Cheng Lou. Here’s a gif that has been blowing up social media: There’s no doubt about how impressive this demo is. The speed in which the text moves out of the way of the dragon is pretty incredible. As expected,…