Discussion · bonfire.cafe

@leaverou@front-end.social · 4 months ago

🔥 I have news! After a 1y hiatus, I’m once again leading this year’s #StateOfHTML survey, thanks to generous funding by Google. ❤️

🙋🏽‍♀️ Is there is an HTML feature or Web API you're dying to see progress on? Suggest it and it could be included!

Browsers fund these surveys to see what matters to devs — so if others care too, it can really help. E.g. these surveys are the reason we have CSS Nesting.

⌛️ The survey is launching later this month, so time is of the essence!

https://lea.verou.me/blog/2025/design-state-of-html/

Pati Boh

@patiboh@mastodon.social replied · 3 months ago

@leaverou
A recent experience implementing a vertical range input made me really wish for a more even cross-browser experience when attempting to style its Shadow DOM parts

Pelle Wessman

@voxpelli@mastodon.social replied · 4 months ago

@leaverou My wish: A way to build a PWA that can do continuous audio playback without having to be a SPA

Use case:

- Playing a podcast episode on a newspaper site while navigating that site
- Building a PWA equivalent to a podcast app

jfroehlich

@jfroehlich@mastodon.social replied · 4 months ago

@leaverou very cool! How about the default accessibility of HTML elements. Would be nice if all were accessible out of the box.

Lea Verou, PhD

@leaverou@front-end.social replied · 4 months ago

@jfroehlich Do you have any examples of HTML elements that aren't accessible out of the box, or is it a more general question?

jfroehlich

@jfroehlich@mastodon.social replied · 4 months ago

@leaverou usually inputs like date and color e.g. https://adrianroselli.com/2019/07/maybe-you-dont-need-a-date-picker.html

Toby Evans

@tobz@mastodon.nz replied · 4 months ago

@leaverou All/Any verb in form action.

e.g. <form method=“delete”>…</form> should just send a DELETE request.

westbrook

@westbrook@mastodon.social replied · 4 months ago

@leaverou These all power HTML in some way or other...

- Scoped Custom Element Registries
- Reference Target API
- elementInternals.type https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/ElementInternalsType/explainer.md
- Declarative CSS Modules and the adoptedstylesheets attribute https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/ShadowDOM/explainer.md
- Declarative Partial Updates https://github.com/WICG/declarative-partial-updates
- DOM Parts
- Platform based windowing/virtualization
- <tabs>

I've got lots more for CSS/JS if you get signed up for those.

Good luck with the survey!

#webComponents #webComponentsCG #webDev

Lea Verou, PhD

@leaverou@front-end.social replied · 4 months ago

@westbrook Oh absolutely, anything web components related is entirely within scope.

re:<tabs> are you thinking of a specific proposal?

westbrook

@westbrook@mastodon.social replied · 4 months ago

@leaverou I haven't specifically kept up on <tabs> and the like to know to know if there's one worth pursuing, so maybe that's a proxy bullet for adding more elements natively to the browser. IIUC, that requires more flexibly in the parser which would open the door for more and more new elements, which is a win for everyone!!!

spartanatreyu

@spartanatreyu@mastodon.social replied · 4 months ago

@leaverou Poor built-in web controls that forces devs to reach for other poor solutions, for example:

- Tabs
- Combobox / Autocomplete / Select with search / datalist where value is constrained to listed options
- Range that actually supports inputting a range rather than one value in a range

Tim Chase

@gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe replied · 4 months ago

@leaverou

I'm still regularly frustrated by HTML's lack of a native tab-set form control. Every OS has them; browsers even use them in their local UIs (as shown in the image).

Yes, you can use hackery¹ like radio-buttons and along with :checked to show/hide form panels, but you can feel the hack.

⸻

¹ https://css-tricks.com/functional-css-tabs-revisited/