Tyler’s CSS Wish List for 2023
Dave Rupert shared his CSS wish list for the new(ish) year and said he’d love to see the same from others. Challenge accepted, friend!
- View Transitions API, specifically for multi-page experiences. Everything in Dave’s list is gold, but this is easily the one thing in the list I’m most excited for.
- I’ll also echo Dave’s wish for Relative Color Syntax.
- I know they’re already pretty well supported, but Container Queries and
:haswon’t feel 100% real to me until Firefox supports them by default. - Subgrid. I adore CSS Grid Layout, but the lack of subgrid in Chrome and Edge is a regular source of frustration.
- I’d also love
display: contentsbut without the accessibility issues. - Line wrap balancing for multi-line headings and similar text. I frequently hear feedback related to typographic orphans or requesting line breaks at specific viewport widths, which is challenging to address when the content is dynamic.
@property. I want to animate custom properties, and not just in Chrome/Edge!- More SVG stuff. Apparently we can style circle radii now, but there are a bunch of other useful features we could have, and some exciting updates to WebKit’s SVG engine already in development.
Also…
(Looks back nervously over both shoulders)
…I don’t care if we ever get native CSS nesting.
(Runs away)
Tyler Sticka has over 20 years of experience designing interfaces for the web and beyond. He co-owns Cloud Four, where he provides multidisciplinary creative direction for a variety of organizations. He’s also an artist, writer, speaker and developer. You can follow Tyler on his personal site, Mastodon or Bluesky.