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Notes from 2026

The Standards Blog

Shorter, present-tense pieces on building for the web as it is now — and as it will still be later.

Core RequirementsBronzeSilverGold
News

WCAG 3.0's Draft Swaps Pass/Fail for Bronze, Silver, Gold

The W3C's October 7 editor's draft replaces A/AA/AAA with Core Requirements plus an achievement score — here's what's settled and what's still moving.

6 min·2026-10-13
News

JPEG XL Ships in Chrome 155 and Firefox 157

Chrome 155 and Firefox 157 both ship native JPEG XL decoding this month, ending years of browser disagreement over the format.

6 min · 2026-10-10
CSS

CSS Custom Properties and Design Systems: A Practical Guide

How to use native CSS custom properties as the backbone of a design token system that scales across themes and components.

7 min · 2026-10-12
News

Firefox 157 Ships at-rule(), CSS's Missing Feature Test

@supports can finally ask "does this browser understand @scope at all?" — no more guessing from unrelated property support.

5 min · 2026-10-06
Performance

Core Web Vitals in 2026: What Changed and What to Fix

Google's 2026 update changed how INP is measured and weighted — here's what shifted and the concrete fixes for LCP, INP, and CLS.

7 min · 2026-10-08
News

Chrome 155: Corner Shorthand and symbols() Ship

Per-corner radius shorthands, an inline counter function, and whitespace-aware underlines land in stable Chrome.

5 min · 2026-10-07
News

Chrome 154: Accessible Scroll Markers Land in CSS

scroll-marker-group gets real keyboard and screen-reader semantics, plus two other quiet fixes.

5 min · 2026-10-03
HTML

Semantic HTML for Better SEO: What Actually Moves the Needle

Semantic markup is not a ranking hack — it's the difference between a page a crawler can parse confidently and one it has to guess at.

8 min · 2026-10-05
Craft

URLs Are a User Interface

A URL is the smallest, most durable piece of UI you ship — treat it like one.

5 min · 2026-08-27
CSS

The Quiet Power of the Cascade

Modern CSS quietly retired the resets, the hacks, and most of the reasons we once dreaded the cascade.

5 min · 2026-06-19
Accessibility

Accessibility Is a Standard, Not a Feature

Accessibility isn't a toggle you add near the deadline; it's the baseline the platform already gives you.

6 min · 2026-04-03
HTML

Writing HTML That Outlives Your Framework

Frameworks arrive and retire on a schedule; the markup underneath is what actually endures.

6 min · 2026-02-11