Anne van Kesteren

Introducing the new Safari MCP server 🎊 Connect your agent directly to a live Safari browser window so it can find bugs and examine the page on its own. Available in Safari Technology Preview 247. Details here 👉🏽 webkit.org/blog/18136/i... Give it a try and let me know what you think ❤️

We're experimenting with a way to visualize session history in Firefox DevTools, and we'd love your feedback! Here's the background, and how to try it: blog.farre.se/posts/2026/0...

What's this, a new HTML proposal? Built-in localized time formatting in HTML! github.com/whatwg/html/...

This week I'm in A Coruña, Galicia, attending the @webengineshackfest.org 👩‍💻 where we are discussing the future of web engines and standards. Given the potential impact on future web development, I thought it would be helpful to share some of my personal notes from the event. ✍️👇

I'm hiring to the WebKit Privacy & Adtech team! Help us prevent online tracking/fingerprinting, and design+implement privacy-preserving alternatives for use in advertising. · Systems programming in C++ & Swift · Location: Cupertino · Work that feels good and important jobs.apple.com/en-us/detail...

If you have existential feelings about the state of your software stack, just remember that on the web it’s completely undefined which element a mouse click returns.

Evergreen sentiment. (If you always wanted to be a specification editor, wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Specs/t... has some suggestions. Most still relevant.)

Web component folks: A common feature with request is to "inherit from a button". If that's something you want, which specific button behaviours is it you want to inherit? Why is putting a button in the shadow root not the answer?

I got permission to share this, and I'm extremely grateful for that. The Onion got this letter from one of our subscribers in Alaska. She works with dementia patients and decided to leave a copy in the car for each one. This email made my year. Read it and you'll see what I mean. People are good.

APNG finally graduated from its MozillaWiki documentation to a proper standard: www.programmax.net/articles/png...

If you want to learn more about Declarative Web Push or Web Push in general, my colleague Brady put out a great video: developer.apple.com/videos/play/...

If you write code to make websites (HTML, CSS, JS, Web API, Media) and you get frustrated trying to wrangle your code to work in Safari, which bugs are blocking you? Which existing features would you most like to see improved? If you got a chance to order priorities which effort would you put first?

Please don't publish / release a polyfill for unshipped Web features. Someone is bound to use it in production and ruin it for everyone else.

And yet another polyfill appears to have poisoned the standards well. This time for scoped custom element registries. People never learn. 🫠

I have at times told people that if you want to generate XML, you should use a serializer. So when I had to generate a serialized CSS URL value containing a data: URL of an SVG document of which colors could vary, I immediately went for string manipulation and concatenation. 😅

📅 Save the dates! The Web Engines Hackfest 2025 will take place June 2-4 in A Coruña, Galicia (Spain). Check more details at: webengineshackfest.org

The aliens are coming and their goal is to invade and destroy Earth.

Almost time to sign off for the year. Web standard proposals to finish in (early?) 2025: - Declarative Web Push - Scoped Custom Element Registries - HTML (and SVG & MathML) Sanitizer API - moveBefore() - fetchLater() - float16 in 2D canvas - <button command> and quite a few more. Happy holidays!

git blame as visualized by GitHub (or Searchfox for the HTML standard) is an amazing development tool for projects that span decades. In particular for projects that enforce good commit messages. Being able to answer why something is the way it is, can be crucial when changing it.

@annevk.nl and I worked on a refined proposal to untie scoped element registry from shadow DOM so that you can use a scoped registry without shadow DOM. Your feedback is appreciated: github.com/whatwg/html/...

We implemented a new value for `background-clip` called `border-area`. It lets you use CSS fill a border with a background image or gradient. This article explains how it works, and shows up the possibilities in 7 demos. #css #webdesign #webdevelopment #graphicdesign webkit.org/blog/16214/b...

The increased URL interoperability between browsers motivated me to do another pass at the remaining open issues. Fully solving file: URLs and URL parsing overall feels within reach for 2025. The IDNA BiDi issue depends on Unicode, but it is scheduled for Unicode 17.0.

This seems like a great idea at first, except that it is very ASCII-compatible-alphabets-centric and ASCII has confusables as well, e.g., l vs I. Passkeys are the answer.

After working on URLs for well over a decade, we finally hit a point where real browser convergence on core aspects is happening. Experimental browser builds are at ~96% (Chromium), ~99% (Gecko), and ~100% (WebKit) in Interop 2024’s URL category. Very exciting to see! Kudos!

www.keithcirkel.co.uk/100-patches-... 100 patches to 5 browsers in 18 months.

Just look at that Interop 2024 score… wpt.fyi/interop-2024

It seems chain letters are still alive somehow.

If your website does its own video controls, please adopt the :volume-locked pseudo-class to determine whether to offer volume control. Notably iOS and iPadOS manage their volume globally.

My colleague @serena.nz gave an amazing PurpleCon talk describing the behind-the-scenes experience of removing the (in?)famous lock icon from Chrome: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUAx... One day I aspire to get as many laughs during a talk as a 90s sitcom laugh track 🤩

In London for the HTTP Workshop. 🎡

Please help me complete this Bluesky WebKit starter pack: go.bsky.app/784yHbN

Finally had some time to review WHATWG HTML Standard PRs. A lot of exciting technology in the works: <button command commandfor>, ShadowRealm, enforcing noopener for cross-top-level-site blob: URLs, <dialog closedby>, a completely revamped <select> element, and then some.