Frontend Focus
Plus WordPress 7.0, a slimmer State of CSS survey returns, and the state of CSS centering in 2026.
Together with  Clerk
🚀 Frontend Focus

#​743 — May 27, 2026 | Read on the web

The State of CSS Centering in 2026 — Temani offers up a fresh exploration of a perennially popular CSS topic, promising some hidden tricks and modern features you may not be aware of, especially now that things like place-content and CSS anchor positioning are in play.

Temani Afif

See Every Auth Event Across Your App in Real Time — Clerk's new Application Logs streams a reverse-chronological feed of auth, billing, and org events. Filter by event type, actor, subject, trace ID, or date range. Click any entry for full metadata and a JSON payload. Available on all plans.

Clerk sponsor

🗳️ The State of CSS Survey for 2026 is Now Open — This year’s edition covers fewer features, meaning you should be able to get through it quicker. It focuses “on the ones that matter most”, adding that in an age of AI-assisted coding “maybe doing less — but doing it better — is how those of us who still insist on hand-coding [..] can stay competitive”.

Devographics

What's Missing in CSS Layout — Patrick, drawing from the results of last year’s State of CSS survey, explores the friction points of modern web design and layout, looking at what gaps are left for CSS to fill.

Patrick Brosset

▶  Google Might Have Just Killed Websites — Post I/O, Kevin talks about the inflection point we find ourselves at, with AI scraping devaluing websites en masse, and AI summaries removing the need to click — asking what this means long term. There’s related reading to be found in the YouTube description.

Kevin Powell

⚡️ IN BRIEF

📙 Articles, Opinions & Tutorials

CSS vs. JavaScript — When it comes to animation performance, which performs better, and when? Josh takes a look at the nuances involved and the performance implications of different animation strategies.

Josh W. Comeau

Chrome Introduces Declarative Partial Updates — Chrome 148 introduces (behind a flag) two experimental features for declarative partial updates: <template for> brings JS-free templating into your markup, while setHTML() and streamHTML() lets you safely stream HTML blocks into the DOM out of document order. Polyfills are offered for both.

Pollard and Rosenthal (Chrome)

Your Puppeteer Setup Breaking at 500+ PDFs a Night? — Foxit's HTML-to-PDF API handles rendering, fonts, and batch concurrency so you don't run a Chrome fleet in production.

Foxit sponsor

Maybe Don’t Rely on Google’s “Modern Web Guidance” — Last week we shared news of Google’s new set of LLM skills designed to help build modern web apps. Adrian has some thoughts, recommending we “probably ignore” for… a few reasons.

Adrian Roselli

Don't Put aria-label on Generic Elements Like divs — Explains why slapping aria-label on a plain <div> or <span> is both a spec violation and tricky in practice. There are exceptions, but screen readers across browsers and operating systems show wildly inconsistent results.

Manuel Matuzovic

Framework-Agnostic Design Systems: A Practical Approach to Web Components — An accessible guide that covers managing, building and packaging design system components.

Scott Riley

Advanced Tree Counting: Mathematical Layouts with sibling-index() and sibling-count()
Durgesh Pawar

Cross-Document View Transitions: Scaling Across Hundreds of Elements
Durgesh Pawar

Is AI Causing a Repeat of Frontend’s 'Lost Decade'?
Mauro Bieg

🧰 Tools, Code & Resources

Tegaki: Turn Any Font Into Animated Handwriting — Supports any font or text (including non-English) and works with all major frameworks. A bunch of handwriting fonts are built into the package and you can try it live in this playground. Neat!

Gokhan Kurt

Add Semantic Search to Your App Without a Separate Vector Database — EDB Postgres supports pgvector for AI semantic search in existing infrastructure, meaning no separate vector database.

EDB (Creators of EDB Postgres AI) sponsor

font-size-adjust-calculator: A Font Metrics Calculator for the font-size-adjust Property — A straightforward, no-frills tool — just upload a font in TTF, OTF, WOFF, or WOFF2 format, and plug in some optional variable font settings, and it will provide a suitable value for the font-size-adjust property.

richard rutter

Tailwind CSSTree: CSSTree Syntax for Tailwind — A JS package that allows you to use the syntax from CSSTree (a parser/walker/generator for CSS) in Tailwind projects. You can use it directly with CSSTree and it's compatible with the ESLint CSS Plugin.

Nicholas C. Zakas

dev.css: CSS to Make Any Plain HTML Modern and Responsive — Inspired by new.css, a set of default styles for standard HTML – potentially useful for a simple blog, an “about” site, or similar. Demo page.

Devin

La Carte Blanche: Free Printable Project Definition Card for UX Strategy
Stéphanie Walter

👀 All Eyes on JSON

JSON For You: JSON Visualization and Processing Tool — Includes graph and table view modes, nested parsing, support for jq, and ability to import/export CSV. We see a lot of tools like this but the output here (above) is particularly elegant. Try it here.

loggerhead

Issue 742 #743