All the stale things

Divya Sasidharan leads a deep discussion with Jerod Santo, KBall, and Nick Nisi on what’s stagnating in browsers. What has remained the same in browser tech over the last 20 years that remains a pain point in working with browsers? For example - Focus in browsers hasn’t changed much in 20 years. Why is that and how do we go about making all the stale things in browser tech better?

Discuss on Changelog News

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Featuring

• Divya Sasidharan – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Twitter, GitHub
• Kevin Ball – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Nick Nisi – Twitter, GitHub, Website

Notes and Links

Segment 1: APIs that were not developed

• [Proposal] Focus Traversal API
• Input elements are still terrible; CSS appearance property
• Container queries
• Dates still suck, but they are being fixed
• Luxon
• Web Components (RIP?)
• BUT Shadow DOM
• Consistency of CSS Properties BUT Houdini
• Button cursor — why do still have to do button { cursor: pointer; } ???
• SVG amazing but still 2nd class citizen
• Accessibility should be down in the browser

Segment 2: Hypothesizing

• Why didn’t these APIs get anywhere?
• What would’ve needed to happen for them to have progressed?
• Browser wars; the move towards chromium

Segment 3: Shout-outs!!

(in order of appearance)

• KBall: Rachel Andrew’s CSS Grid articles: Understanding CSS Grid: Creating A Grid Container and Understanding CSS Grid: Grid Lines
• Jerod: Justine Haupt’s open source DIY rotary cell phone
• Nick: Tatiana Mac’s talk titled How Privilege Defines Performance
• Divya: Understanding the ECMAScript spec, part 1

Episode source