WebDev Weekly - Issue 65
It's a browser-heavy week, and for once that's a good thing. Safari 27.0 has landed with one of the largest feature lists WebKit has ever shipped, custom select styling included, and Chrome 154 quietly retires one of the web's oldest workarounds by letting iframes size themselves to their content. To balance all that shiny newness there's a lovely look back at IE-era CSS hacks, a couple of clever new CSS properties to play with, and an async/await quiz that dented my confidence more than I'd like to admit. Enjoy.
Articles
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Two lovely brand-new CSS properties
joshwcomeau.com
Have a read about
corner-shapeandborder-shapeto help create more complex shapes in CSS, such as notches, scoops, bevels and squircles. -
A Design Space Exploration of Async/Await
cel.cs.brown.edu
Every language pitches async/await as synchronous-looking code, and the same two keywords appear everywhere. But behind the shared syntax hide nine independent design decisions, and no two of seven modern runtimes agree on what even the simplest async programs should do. Try out the interactive quiz.
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The case against JPEG XL
giannirosato.com
An AV1 codec developer's sharp, data-driven counterpoint to Mozilla's JPEG XL intent-to-ship - excellent debate fodder for the image-format wars.
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CSS Curiosities of the Past
vale.rocks
IE expressions, filters, and HTML Components: a delightful tour of pre-standards CSS hacks - a sequel to the HTML relics piece from last week.
Tools
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SnapDOM - browser capture engine
snapdom.dev
Zero-dependency DOM-to-image capture engine; v3 adds Shadow DOM and web-font support plus PDF/GIF/video export plugins.
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fallow-rs/fallow: Codebase intelligence for TypeScript and JavaScript
github.com
Rust-based codebase intelligence for JS/TS - dead code, duplication, complexity hotspots, architecture violations - runs as
npx fallowor a PR gate.
Tutorials
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Better Icon and Label Alignment
ishadeed.com
Ahmad Shadeed's lh-unit offset technique for the eternally fiddly icon-plus-label alignment problem; made it to Hacker News front page this week.
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Comparing Values With CSS progress()
blog.master.dev
Hands-on intro to the new
progress()function for mapping values against ranges in pure CSS, with practical conditional-styling demos. -
Custom Scrollbar Component In 2026
blog.master.dev
Scroll-driven animations + anchor positioning + container queries replace all the JavaScript scrollbar math - with an honest note on the accessibility trade-offs.
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Building an Interactive Crumpled Paper Effect with Houdini VAT and Three.js | Codrops
tympanus.net
Full Houdini → vertex-animation-texture → Three.js/cannon-es pipeline for crumpled paper you can unfold, grab, and throw.
Sponsored
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HTML to Image API - Convert HTML, CSS and URLs to PNG or PDF
html2img.com
REST API that converts HTML, CSS or any URL into PNG images or PDF documents. Free tier, seven language guides, named templates for invoices, social cards and more. Render any HTML and CSS, with JS support, into an image using a full Chrome rendering engine. Super quick and easy to get started, with a bunch of free credits on new accounts.
Releases
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Responsive iframes in Chrome 154
developer.chrome.com
Chrome 154 adds support for responsively-sized iframes, letting an iframe size itself based on the intrinsic size of its embedded document. No more
postMessagehacks. -
WebKit Features for Safari 27.0
webkit.org
One of the largest ever Safari releases. A new MCP, custom
<select>,<model>support. 83 new features in this huge update.