When is an API not an API?

Not All Browser APIs are "Web" APIs — An interesting look at how some of the most popular APIs truly work, sharing how many of the web APIs we all use have third-party dependencies or are essentially standardized interfaces masking as vendor services. A good thing to be aware of for privacy, reliability and portability reasons.

Kilian Valkhof

Build Marketing Sites Like Apple — Learn how modern, high-impact marketing sites are built from someone doing it at the highest level. Matias Gonzales, Design Engineer at Vercel, teaches GSAP animation, scroll-driven storytelling, 3D with Three.js, and performance-first techniques used on award-winning sites.

Frontend Masters sponsor

🌐  Introducing the <geolocation> Element — As of Chrome 144, you can now use a new semantic <geolocation> HTML control for requesting user location data, moving away from a JavaScript-triggered prompt. There’s a Chrome-only demo here. There is cross-browser interest in this approach, but some concerns and issues remain — so keep in mind it’s not a global standard just yet, though there is a polyfill.

Viana, Le, Steiner

Firefox 147 Release Notes for Developers — A sizeable release, with support for CSS anchor positioning, the Navigation API, CSS module scripts, view transition types, and WebGPU is now enabled on all Apple Silicon Macs.

Mozilla

💡 Notably, the release of Firefox 147 means all major browsers now support CSS Anchor Positioning, something many developers have been waiting for.

📙 Articles, Opinions & Tutorials

Death to Scroll Fade! — A neat effect perhaps? This article demonstrates why it may be more than a tad annoying in practice, along with the potential performance hit such an effect can bring.

David Bushell

Web Dependencies are Broken; Can We Fix Them? — Lea delivers a compelling call to action on a problem many devs will have encountered: why is managing dependencies and introducing them into our code so unnecessarily messy and what should we do about it?

Lea Verou

How CERN Cut Storage by 95% and 40x’d Query Speed with TimescaleDB — Learn how CERN engineers modernized Large Hadron Collider time-series data for performance, scale, and cost efficiency.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

What's the Minimum Markup Needed to Create a Modal? — Your options for building a modal dialog without any (or as little as possible) JavaScript.

Max Design

Date is Out, Temporal is In — The Temporal API has been promised as a future API tackling the weaknesses of JavaScript’s Date for years — that future is now finally arriving (not least in this week's Chrome 144 release).

Mat “Wilto” Marquis

Bytes I Can Delete After All This Time — Thanks to advancements in CSS and JS there’s a growing number of techniques we no longer need — Remy shares a quick laundry list of just what we can ditch.

Remy Sharp

SVG Filters are Just Amazing — Amit has been experimenting with what we can do with the filter property, and shares his findings here.

Amit Merchant

Tips for Making the DevTools' Performance Panel Less Overwhelming
Ian Duffy

What Happened (and What's Happening) to WebAssembly
Emnudge

ARIA Roles Can Remove Their Children’s Semantics
Stefan Judis

How I Write Custom Elements with lit-html
Dave Samaniego

🧰 Tools, Code & Resources

Fabric.js 7: A JavaScript HTML5 Canvas Library — Provides an object model on top of canvas elements, as well as SVG-to-canvas and canvas-to-SVG features. There are also lots of demos, complete with code, to enjoy.

Bogazzi, Nen, et al.

HTML Minifier Next: A Powerful JavaScript-Based HTML Minifier — A CLI-based HTML minifier tool that can also handle in-document CSS, JavaScript, and SVG minification. Jens shares an update on the project here.

Jens Oliver Meiert

Fix Broken Image Uploads in 5 Minutes — Wrap a file input with <pintura-input>. Users fix their images before upload. Pintura does the rest. No backend changes.

Pintura sponsor

jsPDF 4.0: Client-Side JavaScript PDF Generation — Create tickets, documents, certificates, etc. all on the fly. There’s a live demo to try.

Parallax

Aether CSS: An Interactive App to Build UIs with Liquid Glass, Glassmorphism & Neumorphism — You can choose from existing presets for each of the styles, or customize a preset’s values with various advanced settings. The full CSS & HTML is viewable to copy/paste.

Dimitrije Djekanovic

@vtbag: A Resource for Tools & Info on the View Transitions API — If you want to get up to speed on View Transitions, this is a great place to start. Includes basic info, various tools and libraries, and a bunch of practical demos showing what’s possible.

Martin Trapp

👃 FontSniff: AI-Powered Tool to Detect Fonts from Images — Upload any image and the tool will attempt to identify fonts. Companion tools include tools for extracting text from images, including data tables in images.

FontSniff

HTML to Markdown MCP Server: An MCP Server for Converting HTML to Markdown using Turndown.js
Lev Gelfenbuim

Indie UI: Rich Styled UI Components Built with React, shadcn/ui, and Motion
Ali Hussein

MCP Registry: A Directory of Community-Contributed MCP Servers
GitHub