What's new in HTML for 2026

New Things You Should Know About HTML in 2026 — HTML moves a bit slower than CSS and JavaScript, but there's plenty of new features to keep up with. Chris runs through several, including the geolocation element, HTML-in-Canvas, camera and mic management via usermedia, and the model element. A great way to catch up.

Chris Coyier

The Best Dark Mode Toggle is Probably… None — We recently shared some thoughts from Lea on controls for switching between light/dark modes. After weeks of debate, including a rebuttal from Bramus, she returns to ask whether most sites need an always-visible toggle at all.

Lea Verou

Free Course: Build Ambitious Modern Interfaces Faster with OpenAI Codex — Join Katia Gil Guzman for this free Codex course and learn how agentic coding has changed frontend development. You'll cover setup, prompting, feedback, skills, automations, deployment and more.

Master.dev sponsor

Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts — A tour of various snippets of code that commonly appear in HTML, but which are largely byproducts of a bygone era and are no longer needed. Conditional comments, X-UA-Compatible, and cleartype directives all make an appearance.

Declan Chidlow

🗳️ W3C Opens Its 2026 Community Survey — The W3C has launched its 2026 community-wide survey to gather input from developers and stakeholders on the future direction of its operations and web standards work.

W3C

📙 Articles, Opinions & Tutorials

Creating a Custom Scrollbar Component in 2026 — How to approach building high-performance custom scrollbars, replacing heavy JavaScript arithmetic with modern CSS features and handling sizing and visibility entirely within the stylesheet. A clean, modern approach to a classic UI challenge.

Alexander Inkin

The Browser's Main Thread is Expensive — A thorough look, complete with demos, at spending your main thread time well, including splitting, batching, prioritizing, and deferring tasks, then how to get work off it entirely.

Sunhyoup Lee

The Loading State Isn't the Frontend's Fault — It's the query behind it. TimescaleDB extends Postgres so it returns fast as data grows. Get $1000 credit to start.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

Wiring Up Components with Typed attr() and Container Style Queries — Shows how to feed HTML attributes into CSS properties (like grid column counts or spacing units), then let style queries pass that state down to child components with no JavaScript state or utility classes required.

Brecht De Ruyte

CSS: The Weapon Inside Your Inbox — How CSS can be weaponized against popular webmail providers to do things it shouldn't be able to, like defacing the UI, bypassing image proxies, and building a keylogger.

Gareth Heyes

Testing Cookie Behavior Across Hundreds of Web Surfaces with an In-House Auditor — An interesting ‘big corp’ case study looking at tooling built to audit cookie behavior at scale across various web properties.

Yasmin McDowell and Lawrence Good (Dropbox)

.name Termination — Discusses the impending sunset of .name's third-level domains and the implications for those using it for their online identity.

Neil Fraser

Building an Infinite Liquid Glass Grid with Three.js, WebGPU, and TSL
Filip Kantedal (Codrops)

🦖 How the Chrome Dino Game Works: A Tour of Chromium's Source
Alex Oliinyk

Animating CSS Grid Layouts with CSS Anchor Positioning
Bramus van Damme

🧰 Tools, Code & Resources

Drawably: Hand-Drawn UI Controls — A collection of neat hand-drawn UI controls. The animated pen sketches even get drawn via seeded randomness. Zero dependencies, ~7 KB of JS gzipped and a 3 KB stylesheet. Repo here.

Daniel White

vgpu: Render WebGPU Shaders in the Browser or Node.js — Provides a way to use the same shader in the browser or render headlessly with Node (to a high-resolution PNG or MP4 video). WGSL modules import and export like TypeScript does.

Vercel

Sentry Says It Crashed. Datadog Says It's Slow. Expo Tells You Why — Expo Observe knows your release pipeline, so it ties a startup regression to the exact build or update that caused it.

Expo sponsor

WCAG Radar: Run Accessibility Checks on Pages You Have Open — A bookmarklet and browser extension that runs WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 AA checks against the page you’re on and marks up the results in place, all running locally. Note: 28 of the checks are free, but you get 18 additional checks with a paid upgrade.

Proper Access B.V.

Roux: A Boilerplate of Pre-Defined Native CSS Styling — This HTML/CSS starter provides a foundation of CSS files, variables, base styles, and HTML components. You can see it in action on the docs page.

thoughtbot

The Fixi Project: A Collection of Small Web Libraries by the Creators of htmx — All five libraries – each one a standalone script – are designed to be lightweight versions of their more popular offerings like htmx, Hyperscript, Idiomorph, etc. Source code.

Big Sky Software

🔎 A Minimal Browser for macOS

Confectionery: A Browser for Taking Cleaner Screenshots — A Mac-only browser with a stripped-back UI ideal for taking tidy screenshots with minimal browser clutter. Only a 2.9MB download too.

Vadim Demedes