A missed opportunity to not have all of these examples inline. The page/blog-post would be so much more convincing if it utilized all of these HTML replacements instead (or in addition) to linking to codepen.
Absolutely mind boggling. I've seen it many times before. There's some FooMaker v1.0 announced and you click on it thinking it will allow to easily make Foo and the example is how to disable FooMaker's lights l while AC is running or some other obscure edge case that affects like one in a million people, no examples how to actually use it for most common use case or how the result look like.
The details / summary thing absolutely kills me. There’s basically nothing you can’t do with them. Hiding and replacing markers is easy. But every component library just pretends they don’t exist.
It even saves you the effort of all the aria control and expanded tags: these tags don’t need them.
One drawback of details was that cmd+f search wouldn't play nicely when the details was closed. But now there's a hidden="until-found" you can put on child content, along with an associated event. So you can open the details when a user searches :) super useful
You don't need the hidden="until-found" for details/summary, because that has those semantics automatically, but you can use that for other elements that behave similarly (for example tabs, which can't quite correctly be implemented with details/summary, and so needs to be done by hand).
Also I think the event isn't currently emitted consistently on all browsers (and maybe not at all for hidden="until-found"?) so unfortunately you can't quite rely on that yet if you need to sink some JavaScript state to your html. But in general, yeah, this is a really cool feature.
Yeah, support was patchy until recently (and I think that behaviour might not even have been standardised?) so I think a lot of people have assumed that if you want that functionality you need to do something extra.
Yes, Google started revealing the contents of <details> a few years ago, long after the element was supported in all browsers. Firefox added support earlier this year and Safari just added it.
Supporting the behavior was related to changing the user agent CSS when they're closed and the other browsers implemented it and hidden=until-found at the same time.
That is no longer true! You can do it in CSS with a combination of `@starting-style` and `transition-behavior: allow-discrete`. [1]
Another gotcha you'll run into is animating the height. A couple other new features (`interpolate-size: allow-keywords` and `::details-content`) will let you get around that. [2]
The major issue with this is that modern CSS is almost its own job, to the point we used to have Interface Developers at some place I’ve worked (HTML+CSS specialists). I did frontend for over a decade and eventually lost the train on CSS changes, I don’t even know what’s going on there anymore.
It’s still awesome, but it’s becoming increasingly silly to ask someone to know modern HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Typescript, some build tools, a couple of frameworks, etc.
The amount of JS we ship to clients is a reflection of cost-cutting measures at your workplace, not that every FE dev shuns CSS.
When I started dabbling in web development, writing HTML and CSS was already its own job, and professional JavaScript developers basically did not exist. This was before TypeScript, before Node, before Ajax, before React or even jQuery. If anything has exploded in complexity in the intervening years, it's the JavaScript part of the equation.
I agree that it's increasingly silly to ask someone to be an expert in all of frontend. But the primary driver of that is not all the new CSS features we're getting.
Is that "straight-forward easy to understand and follow JavaScript" the whole thing written from scratch? Or does it use libraries (that use libraries, that use libraries)?
Because I've written my share of javascript-from-scratch in my time - before npm and such. And even if my use-case was limited, in order to get edge-cases and details working - issues long solved by their HTML/CSS counterparts - we needed more and more JS. Many of which handwritten polyfills, agent-detection, etc.
Seriously, things like scrollbars (because the client insisted on them being consistent across user-agents) or dropdowns (because they had to be styled) "visited" state on links, in pure JS are thousands of lines of code.
Maybe not today, anymore, IDK, with current APIs like the history API or aria labeling. But back then, just in order to make the dropdown work with screen readers, or the scrollbars react well to touchpads -in the direction the user was used to based on their OS- took us thousands of lines of JS, hacks, workarounds and very hard to follow code - because of the way the "solutions" were spread out over the exact right combination of JS, HTML and CSS. Edit: I now recall we got the web-app back with the comment "When I select "Language" and start typing "Fr" I expect French to be picked and "enter" to then put the language in French". We spent another few days on functions that collect character inputs in memory and then match them with values. All because "flags in front of the names were of crucial importance".
So, maybe this is solved in modern HTML/CSS/JS. But I highly doubt it. I think "some straight-forward ... JavaScript" is either an `import { foo } from foobar` or a pipe-dream in the area of "programmers always underestimate hours"
Because you need 20x the JS to do the same thing and it’s still not hardware accelerated. These new CSS properties are well supported and will only get better.
Because a team of browser engineers have already written and reviewed the code to do it for you; and (hopefully) it’ll be performant, properly tested and accessible… ;-D
JS animations run on the main thread with everything else, so if your browser is busy doing something else the animation ends up being janky. Using CSS solves that problem.
We've gotten so far away from semantic documents so we could build "apps".
Data used to be first class. You would deliver everything in the HTML container and the style sheets or client could do whatever it wanted/needed with that data.
Native search, native copy, no clever javascript tricks to hide or remove information from the document.
I agree, but must also observe that I have never met a designer who was willing to admit without a knock-down drag-out fight that any animation they put in was not somehow crucial.
I've never met a designer who wasn't completely fine with my suggestions for more pragmatic solutions. Like just styling a default scrollbar instead of implementing my own scrollbar to make it exactly like the design. Using a default drop-down menu instead of rolling my own just so I can round the corners of the selects.
The designers I've worked with are fine with these things. We have more important things to work on than small style details. We can go back and change these things later if anyone actually cares, but generally nobody ever does.
I've never met a designer who cares how it gets done but I have hard time believing they were OK with the corners not being rounded as per the design. They may agree on shipping without the rounded corner, as long as the ticket to round that corner is registered.
I suppose though that we have just had very different life experiences, as that is what the HN guidelines would require of us.
You're doing it wrong. You don't have to remember the incantations. You just have to remember that they exist, and then google them or ask an LLM when you need them.
If you use something enough you'll remember. If you don't, you just look it up when you need it. This is basic programming, nobody remembers everything.
Seriously. As a user I can count on zero hands the number of times I’ve said “Oh great, I’m sure glad this UI is animated!” - and likewise zero times have I missed it when animation isn’t used. Animation is a way to light small units of your users’ precious time on fire, for zero benefit.
As the other user alluded to, Animations are not actually there for people who are comfortable using a computer. The vast majority of users are borderlines in capable of using the internet these days. Animations are supposed to be there to really help guide these users into understanding what the scary machine is doing when they click it. Can they be overused, absolutely, but i think have an accordion fold out animated is a reasonable case. You gotta remember your average user isnt paying any fucking attention, so drawing their attention to important changes on screen is not only good but necessary. I'd prefer no animations ever, but i also dont own an iphone while the majority of the world either does or wants to.
That's the positive interpretation, but none of the discussions I've had with UI designers or managers have been about adding animation for accessibility, and the zeitgeist of the last decade has been that skeuomorphism (of which intuitive animations are a subset) is passé.
So far as I can tell, all that the stakeholders want from the UI, animations included, is pizzazz.
Animations are also a way to explain causal relationships between interactions and their results, and to help build mental models of software behaviour.
Being related to neither software behavior nor the structure of the underlying problem, animations tend to obscure the causal relationships and make it harder for user to build a correct mental model.
I see where you're coming from: animations are overused and even when they make sense they are made too slow and flashy (because otherwise how would the implementors feel like they did something if it's barely noticeable?)
Animations are like bass in music: most people notice them only when they're missing or bad.
> Animating the details element is tricky. By the spec, browsers don’t natively support transitions between display: none and display: block.
Very hot take; then don't animate them!
Animation in a UI is great - you draw the user's attention to a widget that changed because they might not necessarily notice it otherwise. This improves the UX.
With a details/summary, the animation is not needed and can only make a negative change to the UX. There is no positive change to the UX that animating the details/summary elements would bring. When it is opened it is obvious.
If you really really need to animate the details, instead of animating open/close, instead animate the summary background/text color to indicate that the element has just changed state.
Would I like easy animation of open/close? Sure. Does it improve the UX? Nope.
Fun fact: <details> even works on github and similar sites with markdown-based input. You can post large inline logs in issues without cluttering the conversation.
The details / summary feature can also be implemented with pure css without JavaScript. Here is an example: https://docs.go101.org/std/pkg/io.html, just click all "+" signs to expand contents.
Same caveat applies to the "checkbox hack" or any other pure CSS solution. You cannot create accessible versions of most complex controls like tabs without JavaScript.
(That first example could be created semantically and accessibly with <details> / <summary> though!)
I really don't know. I'm not a CSS expert. I've just picked up bits and pieces of CSS knowledge from Google and AI agents. These results often aren't perfect, so you'll need to make some adjustments.
Yes. For example, on Codidact (https://codidact.com), limited HTML access is offered along with Markdown when making posts, and the details and summary tags in particular are whitelisted. I've made extensive use of this in some of my content, for example https://software.codidact.com/posts/289251/289252#answer-289... . If you have NoScript you can easily verify that the expanding sections work perfectly well without JavaScript. They can even be nested, as they are here; and the summary text can contain some other forms of markup without issue. (When crafting the post, however, I had to do some tricky things with whitespace to avoid confusing the Markdown parser.)
Details works even when it's set display:contents too, for even more flexibility. Can't animate from open›close, yet, though. That's pretty much my last frustration with it.
I think the CSS support for that has finally landed, though it means targetting a pseudo element instead. Its been a year, so support is probably good enough you don't care if just the animation doesn't happen.
Note that the transition to `auto` in that post relies on `interpolate-size` which has yet to land on Firefox or Safari, and neither have movement right now.
You can't actually control the open state properly from markup (the `open` attribute only sets the default state), which is why I haven't bothered with them.
I’m not sure this is correct. The DOM class HTMLDetailsElement has the `open` property, which you can use to read/write the details element’s state. If you’re using setAttribute/getAttribute just switch to the property.
Having to use the property on the element instance, rather than the actual HTML attribute, is exactly the kind of wrapper code I want to avoid if I'm using a built-in.
You need some JS to change an attribute as much as you need JS to change a property. What am I missing?
I hope the command attribute (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...) will eventually support this out of the box. In the meanwhile you can write a single custom --toggle command which is generic and works with any toggleable element
`open` works just like checked for a checkbox input. You can set the initial state in HTML and CSS can respond to changes in the attribute if a user clicks it. Markup won't have programmatic control over the attribute by design, that's always done in JS by modifying the element instance.
If you specify the same name on each `details` element they behave like an accordion automatically [1], no need for JavaScript. If you set one of them to open that one will be initially open.
That's not correct. There is no aria-open attribute and the summary implicitly has the correct ARIA state, aria-expanded, indicating that its details element is either expanded or collapsed.
There have been bugs in its implementation, particularly in Safari and differing between mobile and desktop Safari.
The interesting part here isn’t “no JavaScript”, it’s that HTML already covers more use cases than people remember (forms, dialogs, validation, navigation).
I ran into this repeatedly while writing my book "You Don’t Need JavaScript"[0]: most JS in these cases isn’t adding capability, it’s compensating for forgotten platform features.
Very interesting book! These are the types of programming books I wish that were more abundant rather than "Learn X framework/language," those that solve/discuss interesting problems. Just bought a copy.
Agreed! I assume the reason for the forgetting of the features is that at least some were poorly supported when first released so developers create workarounds that then become the de facto standard.
It has been amazing to see the speed up in release and support of new CSS features over the last couple of years! Even the masonry layout has finally reached an experimental stage
Yup, at this point it feels more like habit than necessity. People learned to build things like dropdowns in JavaScript years ago, so they keep doing it that way.
A lot of devs simply don’t look any further when it comes to what HTML and CSS already provide.
That exactly describes me. I'm not a good frontend person. I got really, really good at building desktop GUIs in Swing (Java) back in the day and really imprinted on that way of doing things. When moving to web, I found the the display landscape really challenging to grok. I read a few books and got to where I could get most of what I wanted done, but it always took me way longer than it felt like it should, and certainly much longer than it took my coworkers. In that period I learned the contemporary patterns of the day and got pretty good at using component libraries with frameworks like React and was finally able to make things look and behave more like I wanted them to.
Because at that point so much of the focus was on javascript and component libs/frameworks, I didn't (and mostly still don't) really follow browser development. I looked into things like web components when they were first talked about but found their DX to be quite sub-par (it was still pretty early days) and haven't really looked again.
I'm personally much more interested in systems, infrastructure, devops, and all things backend, so for me frontend is a necessary evil to enable me to surface controls for my stuff to users. It's not that I don't want to stay up to speed and current, it's more that in my limited bandwidth I'm more focused on what I care about. That leads to exactly the pattern you described: I learned and got comfortable with a certain paradigm in a different time, and those ways are quite engrained.
Anyway, thank you for your comment. It really helped me identify a blind spot I previously had (which I intend to rectify) :-)
Most of this is great, except for the input/datalist bits, which are not sufficiently functional to be used in any real scenario. Users expect these interfaces to be tolerant of misspellings, optional sub text under each option, mobile ux niceties, etc -- and so everyone builds this with js...
My main beef with datalist is that there's no easy way to show and allow only text (e.g. Beverly Hills), but have the actual value selected be a number (e.g. 90210). In other words there's no analogy to <option value="90210">Beverly Hills</option>.
That and there's no HTML way to interactively load results. Or are you really going to serialize half a million records to HTML and transfer it all every time the relevant block is added to a page? What if it sits in the header or footer templates?
Indeed, and if I have to build a component for it in JS anyway, I'm highly likely to just reuse that component everywhere I need it rather than have to build, style, and test different implementations in the same app.
Right, I sort of expected there to be an attribute for an url.
<datalist json="search.php?q=toyota+corolla">
But then you would want to send other form values along with it which might make things more complicated than it should be?
Static could be better too. When search engines first started building these auto complete dropdowns the multi word input was really the killer feature. To have something like "green toyota" you would have to generate an element for all color and brand combinations? And the you want it to work for "green toyota corolla" and you get an abc kind of list length.
Perhaps a wildcard would have been fun or regex options.
> Each <option> element should have a value attribute... It can also have a label attribute, or, missing that, some text content, which may be displayed by the browser instead of value (Firefox), or in addition to value (Chrome and Safari)... The exact content of the drop-down menu depends on the browser, but when clicked, content entered into control field will always come from the value attribute
This seems... underspecified. Not ideal that Chrome/Safari aren't aligned with Firefox here, and that there is no standard way to only display the label
Default styling being ugly is often for backwards compatibility with older sites so their look stays as consistent as possible. For that reason opening an issue is likely a waste of time for GP and for the devs.
They also are most certainly quite aware of how the default styling looks in their browser. It wasn't an oversight. That's not to say it doesn't pain them, it often does, but it has been intentional
Try on a phone, it doesn’t work. Now that’s you create html only and no js you need to test all kind of devices to see quirks and try to fix it. And you’ll end up with more hacks to fix other devices and you end up adding Js. And you’ll have html only and html with js. With is much worse that just properly do it in js.
I can see the op is a js hater even tho he keep saying he’s not. Anyway doesn’t matter. Just a small note.
Just been through several frontend interviews in the last few months, where it's clear that they still judge a developer's JS skills (especially React) than being semantically correct on HTML elements.
Every question/exercise is centred around how well you know React hooks, effect, memoization, modern css-in-js etc. Given I've been working with Astro recently, in one interview I talked about DOM APIs and I can see the interviewer raise an eyebrow. In later stage, even I that passed the exercises, still didn't get the job.
Remember that a large part of hiring is finding someone who fits in an existing team. A team that uses react won't appreciate someone choosing to use native DOM APIs instead of a react component.
Weird comment, I'm a web dev that has been using react for 10+ years and I prefer using native browser features whenever possible. I'd honestly avoid hiring framework specific devs because the skills required are never about just one single framework.
Also this is just all JS + HTML here, let's not act like it's impossible to learn the most popular frontend tool at the moment.
In every React team I've been part of we've wanted to use as little react as possible and use native DOM apis when possible. React would be used purely for state management or interactivity.
I feel like teams that have used react enough learn that the less React you can use the better :) it's a great tool, but most teams use it because it's all they know and they don't know what they don't know about html.
Eh. I build apps with Preact, but I prefer candidates who know the core web platform. They’ll be more apt to use the right tool for the job and not be baffled by edge cases.
It's not HTML purism. It's simply recognizing that HTML and CSS have evolved a lot and many things don't need (or are close to not need) JS anymore.
This shouldn't be taken as an anti-JS article, everyone benefits from these gradial improvements. Especially our users who can now get a uniform experience.
So much about html only that makes me load 2mb of code pen and heavy ui to see the example. Yeah it’s terrible ux. same as most of the examples are bad
One thing I am quite hopeful for is customizable selects! It's in WHATWG stage 3 right now. I have seen so many horrors with javascript-based custom dropdowns components. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/a-customizable-select
Plain HTML is very cozy to me - I came of age in that era. Marquee tags 4eva.
But as much as I hate to admit it, it is very difficult to build something functional today with plain HTML and no/minimal JS. If you want, say, a model form that manages its children as well, you're basically going to end up with a 2003-era ASP-feeling application with way too many views and forms (as seen on your employer's current HR system). Or you use HTMX... and you still end up with just as many (partial) views, but now with so much implicit state that you're veering into write-only code.
I dislike modern JS to the extent that I opted for Phoenix LiveView, just so I could achieve interactivity without ever having to touch JS, but in truth it's not a comprehensive solution. Still had to write a web worker, a bridge to handle things like notifications, etc. Plus the future direction of Phoenix, all in on AI, is worrying.
Honestly, I should probably just swallow my disdain and learn to appreciate and use modern JS, as painful as that sounds. I want to write and release cool things, not get caught up in navel-gazing language wars.
> But as much as I hate to admit it, it is very difficult to build something functional today with plain HTML and no/minimal JS.
I would certainly agree that using a little JS can get you further than just HTML. But I think that a plain HTML page is far more pleasant to use (and thus, functional) than the JS monstrosities that dominate the Web today. There's a reason people use the NoScript addon: because a whole lot of website designers use JS in ways that make the experience a ton worse for the user.
It's not an either/or. Modern Javascript is actually really nice to write and use, and you can write it in a tight, minimal way that doesn't bloat the page or slow it down.
Of course you can, but most people still opt to pull in a whole framework (React) or heavy library (jQuery) just to achieve what's essentially a few XMLHttpRequests and some DOM changes.
> Or you use HTMX... and you still end up with just as many (partial) views, but now with so much implicit state that you're veering into write-only code.
You're overthinking htmx then. I do some fairly complex stuff with no extra partials. Trick is just always rerender and use hx-select and hx-target to slice out the bits you want to update on the current page.
Server always has authoritative state and code is dead simple to reason about.
> I do some fairly complex stuff with no extra partials. Trick is just always rerender and use hx-select and hx-target to slice out the bits you want to update on the current page.
Good trick! My only experience of HTMX in production entailed porting Stimulus code, hence the partials, but your approach is obviously much neater. I'll give it a shot, next time it might be suitable.
I miss marquee... I burned more tokens than I'd like to admit to build a marquee-like feature in react and it was really just the same text twice with an animation that hopefully no one notices isn't a clean loop on some viewport sizes (since it restarts after reaching the end).
OT: marquee tags were a missed opportunity to implement horizontal scrolling often used on shopping websites. Now it uses JS to achieve the same.
I have been trying to find other more commonly known UI patterns that could be done natively. The time has long come for tabular data to be put into HTML tables just by referencing the source. Xslt almost did that. Another one is integrating xml http requests with native html. I think HTMz came close to this.
> marquee tags were a missed opportunity to implement horizontal scrolling often used on shopping websites. Now it uses JS to achieve the same.
I have been trying to find other more commonly known UI patterns that could be done natively.
Are you sure you are talking about the functionality of the marquee tag? What exactly do you mean by "implement horizontal scrolling often used on shopping websites. Now it uses JS to achieve the same"?
For a banner-type text "Sale: 50% off until New Year" I can imagine this. And this is possible with almost no JS, by using a CSS animation on translateX. I think you need to pass the initial width of the content one time from JS to CSS via a custom property IIRC, and update that variable on resize, for example using a ResizeObserver, to avoid a jump when reaching the "wrap around"...
But – sorry if this a misunderstanding – I have a sneaking feeling that you might also have things in mind like swipable horizontal lists etc?
This is also possible using CSS in theory (scroll-snap and overflow-auto, and CSS to hide the scrollbars). But last I tried to use it, it simply wasn't good enough to sell it, compared to a fat JS library that did the trick, perfectly, on mobile and desktop.
When it comes to UX niceties, I feel it's pretty common to have HTML+CSS solutions that are good enough in theory, but suck in practise.
For the horizontal scrolling with "snap", I would also like a good JS-free solution. But I feel that the more interactive and complex the UX patterns become, it would be senseless bloat to build a specific implementation into the platform.
I think that "autocomplete" inputs are a good example for this, as discussed in another thread.
I once tried to implement a custom autocomplete using datalist (including dynamically updating the list with xhrs). In the end, the native element had so many issues that it was a waste of time and a JS solution was way better. At the time, that JS solution was Alpine.Js, because it was a b2b app with minimal a11y requirements and JS-allergic developers.
Within an hour, I was polishing keyboard use while the "near-native" solution using datalist was broken in a thousand different ways in every browser and in the end didn't work well at all.
There's a usability and design issue with that as you lose what you're reading as it scrolls off the screen. Also, scrolling is a styling issue and not a document description issue which is what HTML is for.
Note: <marquee> has never been part of any HTML standard since the beginning except the current one which only has it for the purpose of marking it obsolete so people will quit using it.
Sounds great <table type="text/csv" src="mydata.csv"> Then have it generate actual html so that you can target th's, tr's and td's with css.
I believe the lowest hanging fruit would be <div src="article.html">
I think formData should also be available as interactive JSON but perhaps it is possible to also populate a form with fields from a json with something like:
I appreciate the helpful reply, but I think this is precisely the kind of indirection I need to avoid. I'm a sucker for elegance. If left entirely to my own devices I'd probably design a language / write a transpiler of my own, and wind up with exceedingly elegant tooling for websites, and no websites. :)
This is why I don't use Typescript or frameworks in my own projects, I just constantly seek the cleanest abstraction and never get anything done. Using a deliberately messy solution is annoying but at least I accomplish stuff.
HTML and JavaScript serve distinct purposes, making better or worse comparisons logically flawed. Complex/interactive web apps requires JavaScript, period. Attempting to build sophisticated apps solely through HTML (looking at you HTMLX) eventually hits a functional ceiling.
I dont think anyone is arguing Google Earth should be pure HTML. But it is equally false you cant do Gmail with HTML only.
There are things that HTML could do, and should be doing, that is not done or not yet possible simply due to hype and trend from browser vendors. We could continue to polish HTML + sprinkle of Javascript to its absolute maximum before hitting JS Apps. Right now this is far from the case.
Hey the email services has just proved you could offer better than Gmail experience with HTML + small dose of JS. Another example being the new FE on Github.
At the end of the day it isn't really the tech that is the problem. Is how people use the tech. And for thousands of different reasons keeping it simple has always provided better experience evaluated on the whole.
Github's old frontend was mostly HTML with a bit of JS, their new frontend is react. The old UI had its bugs, but it was much better than the react version in my experience. I still commonly find the UI out of sync with itself requiring a reload, but now I also frequently wait for the page to load and viewing large diff's is a performance nightmare.
Actually, I do think that. Wouldn't it be lovely to have an image format for truly enormous images and have the browser request only the chunk currently visible? It could just be a container format with jpg's in it. Let the file system figure out that x/y means tile number 56436.
You could provide multiple image versions for zooming to get to the TB scale.
Computers are really good, performance is astonishing, no reason why we should never be able to use a TB size image. Never is a really long time.
Have epic panoramas, detailed scans from paintings, extremely easy game design and maps that just work.
I assume you mean htmx. It doesn't have to be either/or. You can supplement htmx with Javascript.
The core idea with htmx is that you transfer hypertext with controls and structure built in, not just a JSON blob that requires additional context to be useful.
I have just shipped a very useful and interactive app surprisingly quickly for my customer using just htmx with a little Javascript.
It shouldn't have to be this way though. There is no reason html can't do things it needs to do to build complete apps. We could use reasonable defaults to allow a new type of html markup without JavaScript.
All the http verbs.
Decent html input controls
What else?
Depends on how complex it is meant to be. Just like many wordpress sites that could easily have been static websites, many javascript heavy sites could have easily just have been using htmlx.
If your need really, goes beyond what htmx offers, then you may need Javascript. But in my experience people tend to use the tools they know for their job, not the tools that would be best suited.
FYI, it's easy to cache the html output of a WordPress site, resulting in essentially a static site with graphical admin, page builder, and all the other bells and whistles.
I was stuck on the backend while CSS3 absorbed most of the functionality of Less and Sass and now I’m trying to play catchup. If there had just been a CSS4 I’d be able to find a tutorial to teach me everything I missed in the interim.
The <details> and <summary> elements are great, but I think the bigger missed opportunity is the lack of inline examples/demos on the page itself. Would be much more powerful to actually show these working rather than linking to external codepens.
A few thoughts on the practicality:
1. Progressive enhancement is the real win here, not "replacing" JavaScript. These HTML features provide a baseline that works without JS, then you enhance with JS for better UX (animations, state persistence, etc.)
2. The details/summary approach breaks down when you need:
- Custom animations/transitions
- State synchronization across multiple elements
- Analytics tracking on user interactions
- Keyboard shortcuts beyond basic tab navigation
3. What about the <dialog> element? That's another underutilized HTML feature that could replace a ton of modal/popup JavaScript.
4. Have you explored the Popover API? It's getting broader browser support and handles a lot of common UI patterns without JS.
The spirit of "use the platform" is great, but the title feels a bit clickbaity - you're not really replacing JS, just avoiding it where unnecessary. Which is good practice anyway!
Before anyone wastes a lot of time like I did trying to use the popover API: it is not ready yet. You can do very basic things in all browsers but positioning is still different and/or totally broken per browser.
Yes, HTML & CSS alone won't replace JS. Of course, for complicated form validation HTML is not sufficient. But IMHO it's very important to provide basic functionality in HTML / CSS as much as possible / reasonable. Moving the functionality to HTML / CSS can potentially improve the SEO.
As for positioning, there is an experimental feature @position-try. Here I made a small demo where it handles overflows.
I don't want to be so negative, but we got details and popover after literally decades, and we still have datalist presented as a plausible option? Html is so underdeveloped and the first we all agree on that the first we'll pretend from committee real advancement
The committee is an unsolved puzzle as old as mankind. That's not to discourage you. If you do solve it it would remedy almost all of our problems. If the solution could be found instantly in 5 seconds someone would have solved it already. This one is going to take some actual thinking and modeling.
I know for sure that Apple, who has an important seat on the standard committee, holded back innovation for so long, it's not a matter of finding or not finding solutions. They're failing us for different interests
They are the new Microsoft, if the web died it would be good for them. We've also tried to have elected bureaucrats make the decisions. Systems giving everyone one vote also turned out terrible as expertise and thoughtfulness drowns in superficial noise. It is kind of embarrassing how well the dictator model works. Personally I prefer to do everything alone. There are no meetings, barely any paperwork, I get to own the bad choices. So far I get along well with my past self and my future self. I do consider it a temporary hack until figuring things out in groups is solved. Robot overlords sounds increasingly appealing.
It's great until you have a typo in the field, or want to show options that don't start with what you typed in but appear near the end of an option (think Google search's autocomplete). There's no way to filter in Javascript and force it to show certain options with <datalist>. I've resorted to <ol> for search suggestions.
Until your client tells you that it doesn't work in Edge and you find out it's because every browser has its own styling and they are impossible to change enough to get the really long options to show up correctly.
Then you're stuck with a bugfix's allotment of time to implement an accessible, correctly themed combo box that you should have reached for in the first place, just like what you had to do last week with the native date pickers.
I'd argue that adding complexity from the get-go to ensure that all users have a pleasant experience from the get-go is better than simplicity at the expense of some percentage of users.
I think it's important for web devs to spend more than two seconds to think if the complexity is necessary from the get-go though.
I don't see any mention of HTTP 204 or multipart/x-mixed-replace. Those are both very helpful for implementing rich JavaScript-free HTML applications with advanced interactivity.
I didn't know about <datalist>, but how are you supposed to use it with a non-trivial amount of items in the list? I don't see how this can be a replacement for javascript/XHR based autocomplete.
> If we can hand-off any JS functionality to native HTML or CSS, then users can download less stuff, and the remaining JS can pay attention to more important tasks that HTML and CSS can't handle (yet).
Brilliant I will be adopting a few of these, I have been on a personal quest to reduce js use recently, I feel like I spend more time debugging js than producing the end result.
Use a checkbox, d. Define vars for light mode. Override when checked for dark mode with body:has(#d:checked) and can include the dark mode media query too
Why would you build a switch instead of relying on the user’s system settings? The only reason I can imagine is that your dark/light mode is not usable/readable so it forces the user to switch
I often use different light/dark settings between apps and my system. Just because I want system UIs to be dark, for example, doesn't mean I want to read long pages of white-on-black prose on your blog.
Seconded. Just because I like to have the browser toolbar dark and GitHub dark doesn't mean I also want to read lengthy articles (LWN) in thin white text on a black background.
Having it default to the users preference is nice, but you should still provide an override. I sometimes use my browser in light mode while my OS is dark mode. Many times, I find the contrast for dark mode websites too low unless I’m in a totally dark room.
I was trying to rewrite some UI library with html sometime ago following the W3C accessibility specs and found out a lot of patterns can’t be done with pure html and require javascript unfortunately.
If we've concluded that's it's okay to have elements that change/morph, as we seem to with the introduction of things like details, a native tab-like element feels like a glaring omission. Tabs have been a long-standing UI pattern and forcing every site to implement their own is a nightmare for accessibility. (The page you're reading is maybe already in a browser tab.)
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out less than half of the custom tab interfaces on the web failed from an accessibility standpoint. When considering ARIA guidance, I don't even think it's possible to build an accessible version in HTML alone.
Other people have recognized it's missing. Open UI has a draft spec for it[0] and CSS Tricks has an article from 2001 about Open UI's experiments with sections for tabs[1]. I have no idea what happened on this front, though.
Accordion behavior is discussed in the article in the "Accordions / Expanding Content Panels" section:
> Use the same name attribute on all related details (like radio buttons) to restrict only one open panel at a time
And tabs can be a <details>-based accordion with some creative CSS to adjust the layout (left as an exercise for the reader, but I could write up an example if that would be helpful!)
And yes, being able to do all of these in pure HTML/CSS would be awesome. Though we are getting there with things like `details` and the newer `popover` features which should make things like rich tooltips, menu buttons, etc. a lot easier to implement. IIRC, there are also several anchor CSS properties to make positioning a lot simpler.
i like the points the article makes, but i really wish it used looping videos instead of actual GIFs
i don't really see any reason to use GIFs here; any widely available video codec like H.264, VP8/VP9 or AV1 will result in significantly smaller file sizes, look better, and will allow enabling controls for seeking and play/pause
Your blogs have very small amount solution, but the JS use cases are very large. How this little replacement can do more thing? I usually like the idea of being using as lean as possible, if it's can be possible to do more thing just with HTML and CSS that's obviously cool. Is it really possible to replace JS with HTML in near future?
BTW the toggle solution (expanding content) is good.
The switch from everything tables to everything divs was one of the worst for usability on the web. Every day I run into a table of data that doesn’t sort, copy/paste, search, resize columns or any of the very trivial items to do with tables. It always infuriating.
The problem is that CSS continues to be a pain in the ass, even as it evolves. There is no other reason why something like tailwind should have the traction it has.
A pleasant surprise to see Aaron's post here, we worked together for a bit on frontend optimization in a multi-tenant international ecommerce platform. That work was a large part of my inspiration for building https://contentblocksjs.com which encapsulated a lot of the JS concerns into web components.
That’s a bit of evergreen topic. “stop bloating web with js” comes up fairly often and there are those people who think they found a solution and everyone should start using whatever they imagine is “best for everyone”.
In my opinion most of those people struggle with whatever they encountered in ecosystem and just want to find a way that fits them - while also trying to make others do the same.
*“You didn’t want to make things perfect. You just hated things the way they are.”*
Something I keep thinking about when I consider the trade-offs between building a site with HTML/CSS wherever possible vs JS is what the actual _experience_ of writing and maintaining HTML/CSS is vs JS. JS gets knocked around a bunch compared to "real" languages (although less so in recent years), but at the end of the day, it's a programming language. You can write a loop in it.
Writing a web server in C++ is a way to get excellent performance. So why don't most people do it?
JS got popular because some devs were trying to realize a world where the same code can be shared on the front and backend. I think on the surface, it was a noble goal with good intentions. Having only one programming language to handle is going to create some efficiency gains when you work in a large company with thousands of devs who all need training want to share knowledge as a larger organization.
In the past decade, we went full JS as an industry and now we’re starting to swing back. Server side interactivity like Phoenix Liveview, C# Blazor, HTMX, PHP/Laravel Livewire, Rails Hotwire, all of these are different abstractions around JS to make interoperability between the frontend and backend more manageable and they’ve come a long way to closing the gap. Advancements in HTML/CSS standards also deserve credit for closing the gap but we’re still not quite there yet.
But at the end of the day, the web is dynamic. As new tools and techniques are discovered, the industry will continue to evolve and certain “hacks” will become new standards and ignorant newcomers will reinvent the wheel again to achieve some crazy interactive design because they didn’t know any better! And it wil work, mostly.
Until the way we interact with browsers changes, I feel that we’ll continue to bolt on new features over time and the web will continue to evolve. Just like the iPhone, a surge of use of smart glasses could change the computing paradigm or perhaps its some other device entirely.
So you can (and should!) try to optimize for today, but trying to optimize for tomorrow will always carry the risk irrelevance if the market pivots quickly. Bleeding edge is risky but so is falling behind.
Some of these new HTML features don't fully work in my "ancient" browser. But all of them partially work (ie opening the accordion element doesn't close others but it still opens and closes) and they still remain functional elements I can read and interact with. This puts them far ahead of any javascript implementation which almost universally fail to nothing.
I really try not using JavaScript unless absolutely needed. On my latest project, the whole site actually functions without JavaScript and is server side rendered. However, there's some small piece which I really needed JavaScript for couple reasons.
Basically, I have a site which collects the top STEAMD posts from places like HN, lobsters, tildes, slashdot, bear, reddit etc and displays them in chronological order. I wanted a way for users to block posts with certain keywords or from specific domains. I didn't want to do this server side for both performance reasons plus privacy reasons. I didn't want users to need signing up or something to block. I also didn't want to collect block lists for privacy reasons. So, I resorted to using JavaScript and local storage. All posts within the filter for the date are sent and JavaScript is used to block posts with keywords before displaying. So my server never knows what keywords are blocked.
I'm so not impressed by the toggle implementation... How nice it could have been.
Nesting the elements is a truly hideous choice. The summary is part of the details?? I thought they were opposites.
Should we also put the headings in the <p> from now on?
Identifying a target should be done by id or by name. That it does use a name because js can't target it without makes it even more stupid.
We already had labels for form fields. Inventing a completely different method for something very similar is a dumb idea. The old checkbox hack is more flexible and less ugly for some implementations.
Why force the hidden content to be below or above the toggle? We aren't gaining anything with this.
What is this nonsense for an element to not just be hidden or displayed but to have some weird 3rd state where only one of its children is shown?
How should styling it even work for this new state? If I apply a style to the hidden content it must also apply to the link? The text is hidden but the style is visible??? Preposterous!
Don't try style <details> to avoid unexpected behavior. Try wrapping the hidden content in a new element to make it behave normally.
What is this ugly arrow? If you find 1000 websites using a toggle I doubt there is one using an ugly arrow like that.
The default styling gives no clue about it being clickable?
The pointer (awkwardly called the cursor) choice is the text selection?????
Blue underlined "more" is what everyone does and everyone is used to. The cursor should be pointer. (This is css speak for "the pointer should be a hand")
The number of js toggles you can find online where the button lives inside the hidden text is guaranteed to be zero. Forget about drop in replacement, you will have to reinvent your css.
Maybe I'm dense but I also want my url to reflect the state of the page. I would have been impressed if that was supported. Personally I use actual links and disable default action in the listener if js is enabled/working or modify the state on the server if js isn't available/working.
It would have been great if the toggle action was implemented as a simple attribute something like toggle="element name" so that anything can be clickable and anything can be toggleable. Have a "closed" as well as an "open" attribute for the target.
Doesn't seem very hard. An open/closed attribute would be useful for other things too. Using display:none is terrible as display: is used for many things.
"I also want my url to reflect the state of the page... It would have been great if the toggle action was implemented as a simple attribute something like toggle='element name'"
Your wishlist (state in attributes, URLs reflecting page state, anything being toggleable via simple attributes) is basically describing an architecture I've been working on called DATAOS (DOM As The Authority On State).
The core idea: instead of JS owning state and syncing to DOM, flip it. State lives in HTML attributes. JS just listens for changes and reacts. Want toggle state in the URL? The DOM attribute is the state, so serializing to URL is trivial.
It won't fix <details> being weirdly designed, but it's a pattern for building the kind of declarative, attribute-driven interactivity you're describing.
> Nesting the elements is a truly hideous choice. The summary is part of the details?? I thought they were opposites.
It gives them a semantic connection. Last I checked, HTML isn't really based on giving special meaning to combinations of sibling tags. A summary is part of the thing that conceptually requires detailing.
> If you find 1000 websites using a toggle I doubt there is one using an ugly arrow like that.
I think the default looks fine. But TFA clearly explains right there that it can be styled. (Specifically, by styling ::before on the summary tag.)
> The default styling gives no clue about it being clickable?
You asked what the arrow is, and then asked about the lack of indication that the summary header is clickable. The arrow is exactly that indication.
> Maybe I'm dense but I also want my url to reflect the state of the page.
If you scroll, should the fragment automatically update as you scroll past anchors? I think I'd find that quite annoying.
An element should be visible or not be visible. There shouldn't be a 3rd state. It is a new idea and it is bad. Try writing a polyfill.
Even if you insist it shouldn't be the only way to use it. There should at least be a <summary for=""> so that the clickable thing can be put wherever one likes.
The goal is to make things convenient for the user not to sacrifice usability for some semantics.
But if it was a summary is not semantically part of the details.
I don't actually care about that, I just want to use it.
A summary should be allowed to have hyperlinks. I passionately hate clickable paragraphs but if you are going to do that at least change the pointer into a hand.
I could put the <summary> under the summary the way almost everyone does but then the name makes no sense.
>I think the default looks fine.
A summary (longer than a few words) starting with an arrow looks weird.
The arrow would be reasonable UI for fold out menus but those are not summaries.
I would want some margin on the left for the <details> of the sub menu.
What I don't want is to also have padding on the parent(!) menu item. Seems like a very confused parent child relationship.
>> Maybe I'm dense but I also want my url to reflect the state of the page.
>If you scroll, should the fragment automatically update as you scroll past anchors? I think I'd find that quite annoying.
Depends, if the thing is infinite scrolling and the user needs to send a permalink it would be nice to update it.
If I have an accordion with say frequently asked questions it would be necessary to link to the items.
It often isn't needed but I can't really picture when it would be annoying.
The problem is that it's difficukt to style or animate those things. Unless you're builsing something for dun or technical where it's not important it's fine but i doubt any real world commercial project would be satisfied with just this
It even saves you the effort of all the aria control and expanded tags: these tags don’t need them.
Also I think the event isn't currently emitted consistently on all browsers (and maybe not at all for hidden="until-found"?) so unfortunately you can't quite rely on that yet if you need to sink some JavaScript state to your html. But in general, yeah, this is a really cool feature.
Supporting the behavior was related to changing the user agent CSS when they're closed and the other browsers implemented it and hidden=until-found at the same time.
https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_details_search_match_o...
Animating the details element is tricky. By the spec, browsers don’t natively support transitions between display: none and display: block.
Another gotcha you'll run into is animating the height. A couple other new features (`interpolate-size: allow-keywords` and `::details-content`) will let you get around that. [2]
Modern CSS is awesome.
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/entry-exit-animations
[2] https://nerdy.dev/open-and-close-transitions-for-the-details...
It’s still awesome, but it’s becoming increasingly silly to ask someone to know modern HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Typescript, some build tools, a couple of frameworks, etc.
The amount of JS we ship to clients is a reflection of cost-cutting measures at your workplace, not that every FE dev shuns CSS.
I agree that it's increasingly silly to ask someone to be an expert in all of frontend. But the primary driver of that is not all the new CSS features we're getting.
Because I've written my share of javascript-from-scratch in my time - before npm and such. And even if my use-case was limited, in order to get edge-cases and details working - issues long solved by their HTML/CSS counterparts - we needed more and more JS. Many of which handwritten polyfills, agent-detection, etc.
Seriously, things like scrollbars (because the client insisted on them being consistent across user-agents) or dropdowns (because they had to be styled) "visited" state on links, in pure JS are thousands of lines of code. Maybe not today, anymore, IDK, with current APIs like the history API or aria labeling. But back then, just in order to make the dropdown work with screen readers, or the scrollbars react well to touchpads -in the direction the user was used to based on their OS- took us thousands of lines of JS, hacks, workarounds and very hard to follow code - because of the way the "solutions" were spread out over the exact right combination of JS, HTML and CSS. Edit: I now recall we got the web-app back with the comment "When I select "Language" and start typing "Fr" I expect French to be picked and "enter" to then put the language in French". We spent another few days on functions that collect character inputs in memory and then match them with values. All because "flags in front of the names were of crucial importance".
So, maybe this is solved in modern HTML/CSS/JS. But I highly doubt it. I think "some straight-forward ... JavaScript" is either an `import { foo } from foobar` or a pipe-dream in the area of "programmers always underestimate hours"
2. CSS integrates better with HTML, as it has selectors to automatically bind to elements (yes there custom elements for JS)
Data used to be first class. You would deliver everything in the HTML container and the style sheets or client could do whatever it wanted/needed with that data.
Native search, native copy, no clever javascript tricks to hide or remove information from the document.
The HTML data container should be immutable.
If you really need to detect whether it's supported there are hacky methods: https://www.bram.us/2024/07/11/feature-detect-css-starting-s...
The designers I've worked with are fine with these things. We have more important things to work on than small style details. We can go back and change these things later if anyone actually cares, but generally nobody ever does.
I suppose though that we have just had very different life experiences, as that is what the HN guidelines would require of us.
The biggest gap is Chrome versions > 2 years old.
[1] https://caniuse.com/?search=%40starting-style
You’ve described software.
If you use something enough you'll remember. If you don't, you just look it up when you need it. This is basic programming, nobody remembers everything.
In general I find animations on the web overused and unnecessary
So far as I can tell, all that the stakeholders want from the UI, animations included, is pizzazz.
Animations are like bass in music: most people notice them only when they're missing or bad.
Very hot take; then don't animate them!
Animation in a UI is great - you draw the user's attention to a widget that changed because they might not necessarily notice it otherwise. This improves the UX.
With a details/summary, the animation is not needed and can only make a negative change to the UX. There is no positive change to the UX that animating the details/summary elements would bring. When it is opened it is obvious.
If you really really need to animate the details, instead of animating open/close, instead animate the summary background/text color to indicate that the element has just changed state.
Would I like easy animation of open/close? Sure. Does it improve the UX? Nope.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
We can also use pure css to implement tab panels. A demo: http://tmd.tapirgames.com/demos.html#section-demo-4
Modern css is powerful.
While you can make something that visually appears to act as a set of tabs, building it accessibly unfortunately still requires JavaScript.
[1] https://adrianroselli.com/2019/04/details-summary-are-not-in...
(That first example could be created semantically and accessibly with <details> / <summary> though!)
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/styling-details
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLDetails...
I hope the command attribute (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...) will eventually support this out of the box. In the meanwhile you can write a single custom --toggle command which is generic and works with any toggleable element
`open` works just like checked for a checkbox input. You can set the initial state in HTML and CSS can respond to changes in the attribute if a user clicks it. Markup won't have programmatic control over the attribute by design, that's always done in JS by modifying the element instance.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/html-details-exclus...
It’s odd and frustrating that such an essential tag is not defined to be accessible, afaik.
There have been bugs in its implementation, particularly in Safari and differing between mobile and desktop Safari.
I ran into this repeatedly while writing my book "You Don’t Need JavaScript"[0]: most JS in these cases isn’t adding capability, it’s compensating for forgotten platform features.
[0] https://theosoti.com/you-dont-need-js/
It has been amazing to see the speed up in release and support of new CSS features over the last couple of years! Even the masonry layout has finally reached an experimental stage
A lot of devs simply don’t look any further when it comes to what HTML and CSS already provide.
Because at that point so much of the focus was on javascript and component libs/frameworks, I didn't (and mostly still don't) really follow browser development. I looked into things like web components when they were first talked about but found their DX to be quite sub-par (it was still pretty early days) and haven't really looked again.
I'm personally much more interested in systems, infrastructure, devops, and all things backend, so for me frontend is a necessary evil to enable me to surface controls for my stuff to users. It's not that I don't want to stay up to speed and current, it's more that in my limited bandwidth I'm more focused on what I care about. That leads to exactly the pattern you described: I learned and got comfortable with a certain paradigm in a different time, and those ways are quite engrained.
Anyway, thank you for your comment. It really helped me identify a blind spot I previously had (which I intend to rectify) :-)
Static could be better too. When search engines first started building these auto complete dropdowns the multi word input was really the killer feature. To have something like "green toyota" you would have to generate an element for all color and brand combinations? And the you want it to work for "green toyota corolla" and you get an abc kind of list length.
Perhaps a wildcard would have been fun or regex options.
This seems... underspecified. Not ideal that Chrome/Safari aren't aligned with Firefox here, and that there is no standard way to only display the label
[from]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
They also are most certainly quite aware of how the default styling looks in their browser. It wasn't an oversight. That's not to say it doesn't pain them, it often does, but it has been intentional
I can see the op is a js hater even tho he keep saying he’s not. Anyway doesn’t matter. Just a small note.
Every question/exercise is centred around how well you know React hooks, effect, memoization, modern css-in-js etc. Given I've been working with Astro recently, in one interview I talked about DOM APIs and I can see the interviewer raise an eyebrow. In later stage, even I that passed the exercises, still didn't get the job.
Also this is just all JS + HTML here, let's not act like it's impossible to learn the most popular frontend tool at the moment.
I feel like teams that have used react enough learn that the less React you can use the better :) it's a great tool, but most teams use it because it's all they know and they don't know what they don't know about html.
Like I get this is a blog system but it still feels odd, especially for a "use this plain HTML"-style post...
It seems to link to the authors codepen. If you us code pen you can bookmark the snippets. Codepen colorizes the html/css etc.
Link rot is a thing though, so it’s not always ideal to have dependencies on third party urls staying the same.
A step down is to have JS only on your domain. "Safer" mode.
Try to avoid web site that require "Standard" to view and run properly.
But as much as I hate to admit it, it is very difficult to build something functional today with plain HTML and no/minimal JS. If you want, say, a model form that manages its children as well, you're basically going to end up with a 2003-era ASP-feeling application with way too many views and forms (as seen on your employer's current HR system). Or you use HTMX... and you still end up with just as many (partial) views, but now with so much implicit state that you're veering into write-only code.
I dislike modern JS to the extent that I opted for Phoenix LiveView, just so I could achieve interactivity without ever having to touch JS, but in truth it's not a comprehensive solution. Still had to write a web worker, a bridge to handle things like notifications, etc. Plus the future direction of Phoenix, all in on AI, is worrying.
Honestly, I should probably just swallow my disdain and learn to appreciate and use modern JS, as painful as that sounds. I want to write and release cool things, not get caught up in navel-gazing language wars.
I would certainly agree that using a little JS can get you further than just HTML. But I think that a plain HTML page is far more pleasant to use (and thus, functional) than the JS monstrosities that dominate the Web today. There's a reason people use the NoScript addon: because a whole lot of website designers use JS in ways that make the experience a ton worse for the user.
To be snarky, do they? The average user doesn't even know what JS is.
Users want websites that are fast and solve their problems, with a good UI. They don't care how it's made.
Make websites that people enjoy using. A good developer can do that with any set of tools, though a no-JS approach is limited in scope.
Yet most people don't.
There are some problems with the language itself but it's mostly from a users perspective that I find it frustrating.
You're overthinking htmx then. I do some fairly complex stuff with no extra partials. Trick is just always rerender and use hx-select and hx-target to slice out the bits you want to update on the current page.
Server always has authoritative state and code is dead simple to reason about.
Yes, almost certainly!
> I do some fairly complex stuff with no extra partials. Trick is just always rerender and use hx-select and hx-target to slice out the bits you want to update on the current page.
Good trick! My only experience of HTMX in production entailed porting Stimulus code, hence the partials, but your approach is obviously much neater. I'll give it a shot, next time it might be suitable.
I have been trying to find other more commonly known UI patterns that could be done natively. The time has long come for tabular data to be put into HTML tables just by referencing the source. Xslt almost did that. Another one is integrating xml http requests with native html. I think HTMz came close to this.
Are you sure you are talking about the functionality of the marquee tag? What exactly do you mean by "implement horizontal scrolling often used on shopping websites. Now it uses JS to achieve the same"?
For a banner-type text "Sale: 50% off until New Year" I can imagine this. And this is possible with almost no JS, by using a CSS animation on translateX. I think you need to pass the initial width of the content one time from JS to CSS via a custom property IIRC, and update that variable on resize, for example using a ResizeObserver, to avoid a jump when reaching the "wrap around"...
But – sorry if this a misunderstanding – I have a sneaking feeling that you might also have things in mind like swipable horizontal lists etc?
This is also possible using CSS in theory (scroll-snap and overflow-auto, and CSS to hide the scrollbars). But last I tried to use it, it simply wasn't good enough to sell it, compared to a fat JS library that did the trick, perfectly, on mobile and desktop.
When it comes to UX niceties, I feel it's pretty common to have HTML+CSS solutions that are good enough in theory, but suck in practise.
For the horizontal scrolling with "snap", I would also like a good JS-free solution. But I feel that the more interactive and complex the UX patterns become, it would be senseless bloat to build a specific implementation into the platform.
I think that "autocomplete" inputs are a good example for this, as discussed in another thread.
I once tried to implement a custom autocomplete using datalist (including dynamically updating the list with xhrs). In the end, the native element had so many issues that it was a waste of time and a JS solution was way better. At the time, that JS solution was Alpine.Js, because it was a b2b app with minimal a11y requirements and JS-allergic developers.
Within an hour, I was polishing keyboard use while the "near-native" solution using datalist was broken in a thousand different ways in every browser and in the end didn't work well at all.
Note: <marquee> has never been part of any HTML standard since the beginning except the current one which only has it for the purpose of marking it obsolete so people will quit using it.
I believe the lowest hanging fruit would be <div src="article.html">
I think formData should also be available as interactive JSON but perhaps it is possible to also populate a form with fields from a json with something like:
Where mydata.json is: And have something like this come out: It wouldn't cover everything but it is very nice not to have the later if you don't really need it.There are things that HTML could do, and should be doing, that is not done or not yet possible simply due to hype and trend from browser vendors. We could continue to polish HTML + sprinkle of Javascript to its absolute maximum before hitting JS Apps. Right now this is far from the case.
At the end of the day it isn't really the tech that is the problem. Is how people use the tech. And for thousands of different reasons keeping it simple has always provided better experience evaluated on the whole.
Github's old frontend was mostly HTML with a bit of JS, their new frontend is react. The old UI had its bugs, but it was much better than the react version in my experience. I still commonly find the UI out of sync with itself requiring a reload, but now I also frequently wait for the page to load and viewing large diff's is a performance nightmare.
You could provide multiple image versions for zooming to get to the TB scale.
Computers are really good, performance is astonishing, no reason why we should never be able to use a TB size image. Never is a really long time.
Have epic panoramas, detailed scans from paintings, extremely easy game design and maps that just work.
The core idea with htmx is that you transfer hypertext with controls and structure built in, not just a JSON blob that requires additional context to be useful.
I have just shipped a very useful and interactive app surprisingly quickly for my customer using just htmx with a little Javascript.
All the http verbs. Decent html input controls What else?
If your need really, goes beyond what htmx offers, then you may need Javascript. But in my experience people tend to use the tools they know for their job, not the tools that would be best suited.
A few thoughts on the practicality:
1. Progressive enhancement is the real win here, not "replacing" JavaScript. These HTML features provide a baseline that works without JS, then you enhance with JS for better UX (animations, state persistence, etc.)
2. The details/summary approach breaks down when you need: - Custom animations/transitions - State synchronization across multiple elements - Analytics tracking on user interactions - Keyboard shortcuts beyond basic tab navigation
3. What about the <dialog> element? That's another underutilized HTML feature that could replace a ton of modal/popup JavaScript.
4. Have you explored the Popover API? It's getting broader browser support and handles a lot of common UI patterns without JS.
The spirit of "use the platform" is great, but the title feels a bit clickbaity - you're not really replacing JS, just avoiding it where unnecessary. Which is good practice anyway!
In the meantime, there is a polyfill to load in browsers without support.
https://caniuse.com/css-anchor-positioning
As for positioning, there is an experimental feature @position-try. Here I made a small demo where it handles overflows.
https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-06-29/css-features-web-dev...
But yeah, that's kind of limited if you need nice animations or some other complicated thing. Although it's fun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement
Or accessibility.
It's great until you have a typo in the field, or want to show options that don't start with what you typed in but appear near the end of an option (think Google search's autocomplete). There's no way to filter in Javascript and force it to show certain options with <datalist>. I've resorted to <ol> for search suggestions.
It's good to know these things exist so there are alternatives to reaching for a fat react component as the first step.
Then you're stuck with a bugfix's allotment of time to implement an accessible, correctly themed combo box that you should have reached for in the first place, just like what you had to do last week with the native date pickers.
I think it's important for web devs to spend more than two seconds to think if the complexity is necessary from the get-go though.
Expecting users to press modifiers when clicking on these is so funny.
I mean… 5 year olds can figure out shift-click in Minecraft.
It can't do complex autocomplete. It's ok for simple cases only. I use it with a 25k long list to ease the input. Works well enough for this.
In short: you can’t have an interactive popover (e.g. a toast notification) on top of a dialog modal.
I’d love to use the new native elements but we’re sadly not quite there yet.
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out less than half of the custom tab interfaces on the web failed from an accessibility standpoint. When considering ARIA guidance, I don't even think it's possible to build an accessible version in HTML alone.
Other people have recognized it's missing. Open UI has a draft spec for it[0] and CSS Tricks has an article from 2001 about Open UI's experiments with sections for tabs[1]. I have no idea what happened on this front, though.
[0] https://open-ui.org/components/tabs/
[1] https://css-tricks.com/newsletter/281-tabs-and-spicy-drama/
> Use the same name attribute on all related details (like radio buttons) to restrict only one open panel at a time
And tabs can be a <details>-based accordion with some creative CSS to adjust the layout (left as an exercise for the reader, but I could write up an example if that would be helpful!)
We still should do more with HTML and CSS! And reach for leaner solutions than React everywhere.
But be careful going for a pure CSS solution for things like tabs if you don’t understand the accessibility requirements.
(I wish the HTML spec would move faster on these common patterns!)
And yes, being able to do all of these in pure HTML/CSS would be awesome. Though we are getting there with things like `details` and the newer `popover` features which should make things like rich tooltips, menu buttons, etc. a lot easier to implement. IIRC, there are also several anchor CSS properties to make positioning a lot simpler.
It's pretty difficult for anyone to completely understand all the nuances in HTML and CSS. It's a big mess that gets bigger and messier every year.
We should have just given JavaScript even more power over controlling the viewport and leave HTML and CSS for the history books.
i don't really see any reason to use GIFs here; any widely available video codec like H.264, VP8/VP9 or AV1 will result in significantly smaller file sizes, look better, and will allow enabling controls for seeking and play/pause
BTW the toggle solution (expanding content) is good.
Its so easy, like a breeze!
In my opinion most of those people struggle with whatever they encountered in ecosystem and just want to find a way that fits them - while also trying to make others do the same.
*“You didn’t want to make things perfect. You just hated things the way they are.”*
Writing a web server in C++ is a way to get excellent performance. So why don't most people do it?
Because they already wrote it in C.
Apache and Nginx are both written in C. Together they run 57.7% of all web servers:
https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server
In the past decade, we went full JS as an industry and now we’re starting to swing back. Server side interactivity like Phoenix Liveview, C# Blazor, HTMX, PHP/Laravel Livewire, Rails Hotwire, all of these are different abstractions around JS to make interoperability between the frontend and backend more manageable and they’ve come a long way to closing the gap. Advancements in HTML/CSS standards also deserve credit for closing the gap but we’re still not quite there yet.
But at the end of the day, the web is dynamic. As new tools and techniques are discovered, the industry will continue to evolve and certain “hacks” will become new standards and ignorant newcomers will reinvent the wheel again to achieve some crazy interactive design because they didn’t know any better! And it wil work, mostly.
Until the way we interact with browsers changes, I feel that we’ll continue to bolt on new features over time and the web will continue to evolve. Just like the iPhone, a surge of use of smart glasses could change the computing paradigm or perhaps its some other device entirely.
So you can (and should!) try to optimize for today, but trying to optimize for tomorrow will always carry the risk irrelevance if the market pivots quickly. Bleeding edge is risky but so is falling behind.
I don't want it to be this way, but HTML has nothing approaching even one tenth the ambition of XSLT and XForms.
If HTML were proposed today, you would be laughed out of the room.
A simple page which shows what native components are available with/without the need for polyfills for a given browserslist config
Basically, I have a site which collects the top STEAMD posts from places like HN, lobsters, tildes, slashdot, bear, reddit etc and displays them in chronological order. I wanted a way for users to block posts with certain keywords or from specific domains. I didn't want to do this server side for both performance reasons plus privacy reasons. I didn't want users to need signing up or something to block. I also didn't want to collect block lists for privacy reasons. So, I resorted to using JavaScript and local storage. All posts within the filter for the date are sent and JavaScript is used to block posts with keywords before displaying. So my server never knows what keywords are blocked.
Site for anyone curious:
https://limereader.com/
Nesting the elements is a truly hideous choice. The summary is part of the details?? I thought they were opposites.
Should we also put the headings in the <p> from now on?
Identifying a target should be done by id or by name. That it does use a name because js can't target it without makes it even more stupid.
We already had labels for form fields. Inventing a completely different method for something very similar is a dumb idea. The old checkbox hack is more flexible and less ugly for some implementations.
Why force the hidden content to be below or above the toggle? We aren't gaining anything with this.
What is this nonsense for an element to not just be hidden or displayed but to have some weird 3rd state where only one of its children is shown?
How should styling it even work for this new state? If I apply a style to the hidden content it must also apply to the link? The text is hidden but the style is visible??? Preposterous!
Don't try style <details> to avoid unexpected behavior. Try wrapping the hidden content in a new element to make it behave normally.
What is this ugly arrow? If you find 1000 websites using a toggle I doubt there is one using an ugly arrow like that.
The default styling gives no clue about it being clickable?
The pointer (awkwardly called the cursor) choice is the text selection?????
Blue underlined "more" is what everyone does and everyone is used to. The cursor should be pointer. (This is css speak for "the pointer should be a hand")
The number of js toggles you can find online where the button lives inside the hidden text is guaranteed to be zero. Forget about drop in replacement, you will have to reinvent your css.
Maybe I'm dense but I also want my url to reflect the state of the page. I would have been impressed if that was supported. Personally I use actual links and disable default action in the listener if js is enabled/working or modify the state on the server if js isn't available/working.
It would have been great if the toggle action was implemented as a simple attribute something like toggle="element name" so that anything can be clickable and anything can be toggleable. Have a "closed" as well as an "open" attribute for the target.
Doesn't seem very hard. An open/closed attribute would be useful for other things too. Using display:none is terrible as display: is used for many things.
Your wishlist (state in attributes, URLs reflecting page state, anything being toggleable via simple attributes) is basically describing an architecture I've been working on called DATAOS (DOM As The Authority On State).
The core idea: instead of JS owning state and syncing to DOM, flip it. State lives in HTML attributes. JS just listens for changes and reacts. Want toggle state in the URL? The DOM attribute is the state, so serializing to URL is trivial.
It won't fix <details> being weirdly designed, but it's a pattern for building the kind of declarative, attribute-driven interactivity you're describing.
Free book and open source libraries if you are curious: https://dataos.software/book
It gives them a semantic connection. Last I checked, HTML isn't really based on giving special meaning to combinations of sibling tags. A summary is part of the thing that conceptually requires detailing.
> If you find 1000 websites using a toggle I doubt there is one using an ugly arrow like that.
I think the default looks fine. But TFA clearly explains right there that it can be styled. (Specifically, by styling ::before on the summary tag.)
> The default styling gives no clue about it being clickable?
You asked what the arrow is, and then asked about the lack of indication that the summary header is clickable. The arrow is exactly that indication.
> Maybe I'm dense but I also want my url to reflect the state of the page.
If you scroll, should the fragment automatically update as you scroll past anchors? I think I'd find that quite annoying.
>It gives them a semantic connection.
I understand the logic but I don't agree with it.
An element should be visible or not be visible. There shouldn't be a 3rd state. It is a new idea and it is bad. Try writing a polyfill.
Even if you insist it shouldn't be the only way to use it. There should at least be a <summary for=""> so that the clickable thing can be put wherever one likes.
The goal is to make things convenient for the user not to sacrifice usability for some semantics.
But if it was a summary is not semantically part of the details.
I don't actually care about that, I just want to use it.
A summary should be allowed to have hyperlinks. I passionately hate clickable paragraphs but if you are going to do that at least change the pointer into a hand.
I could put the <summary> under the summary the way almost everyone does but then the name makes no sense.
>I think the default looks fine.
A summary (longer than a few words) starting with an arrow looks weird.
The arrow would be reasonable UI for fold out menus but those are not summaries.
I would want some margin on the left for the <details> of the sub menu.
What I don't want is to also have padding on the parent(!) menu item. Seems like a very confused parent child relationship.
>> Maybe I'm dense but I also want my url to reflect the state of the page.
>If you scroll, should the fragment automatically update as you scroll past anchors? I think I'd find that quite annoying.
Depends, if the thing is infinite scrolling and the user needs to send a permalink it would be nice to update it.
If I have an accordion with say frequently asked questions it would be necessary to link to the items.
It often isn't needed but I can't really picture when it would be annoying.