What’s important #1: Advent calendars, CSS-wrapped, web platform updates and more | CSS tricks

Welcome to the first ever What is importantan overview of the best CSS and web development news from the past two weeks. If you’re short on time (who isn’t?) or you just can’t stand missing something with CSS, this is the place to recap:

• the best CSS/web developer articles from around the web,
• interesting announcements and quick read links we shared,
• the best of what Chrome, Firefox and Safari have recently released,
• and probably more.

Let’s dig in!

HTMHell advent calendar 2025

Manuel Matuzović made this quite hellish (all in good fun) HTMHell advent calendar 2025 consists of 24 HTML-focused articles – basically one every day until Christmas Day. Of course, we’ve already received 16 fantastic items, so you’re in for a real treat with 8 more items on the horizon. The highlight for me so far is the article about Invoker commandswhich will be supported in all web browsers from this week, so a double win!

WebKit flags ::target-text

WebKit has written something about it ::target-text. And I’m glad they did, because I had never heard of it, even though Sunkanmi has also written an excellent article about it here at CSS-Tricks. Target text is the text that search engines sometimes highlight when they take you to a web page, but we can highlight text ourselves when we send links to other people. ::target-text selects this text so we can format it, and it is supported by all web browsers – who would have thought?

Stop using JavaScript to solve CSS problems

Chizaram Ken guides us through the latest CSS tricks we can perform to reduce our dependency on JavaScriptand why we would want to do that. With CSS growing faster than ever before, I think we’ll see a lot more of these articles.

We have granular control over hyphenation

@eva.town at Bluesky said that it would be nice to be able to set hyphenation rules that prevent words like “lighter” from being hyphenated as “light-er” – but @knowler.dev pointed out that this is possible in a sense. The hyphenate-limit-chars property (still waiting for Safari support) allows us to specify the desired minimum number of characters on either side of the hyphen, which is good enough, I guess?

Which color format should we use?

@nadyavoynich.com asked this questionbut honestly, I still don’t know.

Some very good points were made about human-readable sizes and color depth, and I’ve sort of settled on that oklch(). But some UI design tools don’t even support HSL, so?

CSS Wrapped 2025 and State of HTML 2025

It’s that time of year. We’ve had Spotify’s Wrapped, PlayStation’s Wrap-Up and Duolingo’s Year-in-Review – now it’s time for Wrapped CSS in 2025all the latest and greatest things Chrome has done with CSS (and HTML) this year, and State of HTML 2025that’s about HTML in general.

Cool conversations, fun demos and new browser features

In case you missed any of our Quick Hits, here are the latest CSS/Web Developer announcements and links we shared:

Finally, our top picks for the best CSS and HTML features shipped by web browsers in recent weeks:

• Chrome 143
• Firefox 146
  • contrast-color()which ensures optimal color contrast between two colors (or at least once it is exploited CSS color 6)
  • text-decoration-insetwhich gives you control over the position and size of text decorations
  • @scopemaking defining new CSS scoping contexts a basic feature (this is honestly the highlight of my year)
  • @custom-mediawhich is essentially custom properties, but for media queries, is currently being tried out
• Safari 26.2
  • random() generates a random number in CSS, but unfortunately it is not supported elsewhere yet.
  • sibling-index() And sibling-count() get the position and number of siblings respectively (we’re just waiting for Firefox support now).
  • field-sizing allows adaptive sizing for input fields (again, shoot Firefox).
  • command And commandfornow baseline and my pick for the best HTML feature of the year are HTML attributes for declaratively calling certain JavaScript events.
  • hidden=until-foundnow also baseline, for hiding elements until they are found by page search.
  • Moreover, we were never able to set it up cursor on pseudo-elements such as ::before And ::afterbut luckily we can now!

Don’t forget to see us again in two weeks: Happy Holidays!