Cool Links

A great explainer (as always) from Josh Comeau going over the now safe-to-use CSS Scroll-Driven animations, which allow animating elements based on their scroll position on a page, such as entry/exit animations, scroll progress and more, without a single line of JavaScript!

I tried this out a while ago and loved how simple it is, but I always feel like those kind of animations are a bit too much for the type of stuff I build. 😅 Good to have the know-how, though.

Another great article by Josh explaining a neat little trick on how to make the header of a website dynamic… by having it not do anything at all. Don’t worry, it’s quite simple and he explains it way better than I ever could.

Bonus points for not requiring a single line of JavaScript.

This is both funny and incredibly infuriating. A PR was declined on GitHub for an open-source project because it was made by an AI agent and… the AI agent (or the anonymous person behind it) wrote up a defamatory blog post targeted specifically at the project’s maintainer.

If being an open-source maintainer was already a thankless job, now there’s one more hell to endure.

Fantastic piece wielding the power of common sense and highlighting all the struggles that software engineers have with using generative AI on our jobs.

I also use LLMs as a spicy autocomplete (or even a spicy search) and they can be very useful at times. But I can’t replace my thinking with machines, because machines don’t think.

HTML is getting more powerful! Now you can add some predefined commands to HTML elements that can do things like open (or close) modals, for example, without a single line of JS. This article explains really succinctly how that works. The custom commands thing is neat as well.

Lynn talks through a really neat effect added to the latest refresh of their website: a “squishy” animation on the content whenever the window gets resized!

This means you won’t get to see the effect live on your phone, but there’s videos of the effect on the article just in case.

Love the paper-like aesthetic of the website, too.

I definitely didn’t expect seeing a new major jQuery release in 2026, but here it is! This is the first major release in 10 years and it doesn’t bring a lot of new things on the surface, but seems to have been a major overhaul behind the scenes. Looks like a future v5 will bring in bigger changes.

jQuery might be old by JS framework standards, but it’s still very useful, and I actually still use it almost daily at my job.

CSS is my favorite language and 2025 was amazing for it! The Chrome team built this page highlighting all the new exciting stuff that happened to CSS this year. I’ve used some of it but sadly still have to wait for other browsers to catch up before doing it on any serious work 😭

I recommend opening this in a Chromium-based browser so you can try it out firsthand, but there are video recordings of the features in case you’re unable to.

This is the first article that made me actually understand the use cases for CSS subgrid. I’m still not fully convinced I’m gonna use them often, but it’s nice to understand what problems they solve.

This is a really cool trick. Turns out that it’s possible, with pure CSS, to have border-radius be applied conditionally.

The given example is a perfect one: sometimes we have cards with rounded corners that look good on their own, but if you’re on mobile and have less space and want the cards to take up the full page width, the rounded corners look awful. You can technically write breakpoints for that, but with clamp you can make the border-radius disappear if the card is too close to the viewport edges!

In this awesome post, Ahmad walks through all the possibilities modern CSS offers when building a section layout.

I knew about and have used some of those in the past, but that tip about display: contents was amazing! Never thought of using it like that.

This article has been sitting in my “Read Later” queue for almost 2 years 😳

It is an interesting article for sure, speaking about why speed and optimization has become such a rare thing in software development.

The second part of it, though, has kinda aged like milk, sadly. Developers no longer have a lot of leverage on their jobs, and we now live in a world where the thought of having no human developers involved at all in the code I’m running is real and frankly terrifying.

I’m hopeful companies will eventually figure out that AI-generated crap is still crap when the bubble bursts, but until then, there’s a lot of damage to be done.

Great and to-the-point article with practical examples of when to use (or not use) animations properly in UIs.

I love me some whooshy animations, but they can be a pain in the ass when overused or when used in the wrong moment.

The “div vs button” debate was never really a debate because one of the sides is objectively wrong, but this is still a good post to remind you of why it was never a debate in the first place.

Thomas gives a bunch of examples of things you should avoid doing if you want your website to look good on Safari’s new Liquid Glass design. All those don’ts are perfectly illustrated by a website that didn’t take Liquid Glass into account… apple.com.

The new Safari is such an incredible failure.

Yes! Any good developer will tell you that coding is the easiest part of the job. Making software actually go beyond a feature demo is what’s really hard. It’s something I’ve been taught ever since I began working on the field, actually. Learning to code is essential, but learning where to put the code and how to foresee all the hundreds of complexities is my actual job.

Expectations, feature scalability and security are very much human components of the job and can’t be properly done by something that’s not human.

Really cool thoughts on the tradeoffs between control and performance in web development, and how whatever you build will never outperform the browser’s built-in APIs.

A really cool CSS gradient generator that supports all the new CSS color stuff that’s been coming out in the past years (and that I honestly don’t know much about).

Aside from the cool UI and easy-to-understand code it generates, it can generate HDR and SDR gradients; which means that on supported browsers and devices, your gradient might pop out with higher dynamic range (and have the SDR as a fallback). Great if you really want the colors to pop.

This tool looks pretty cool! It’s a two-liner solution for web apps that automatically highlights accessibility issues on whatever you’re working on.

I haven’t tested it myself yet (busy month), but will definitely look into it soon.

Neat short article that goes over a bit of the differences between ems and rems in CSS, with nice examples.