Interop 2027 and beyond

Interop 2027

Here is my own ranked list of the web features I’ve voted for:

  1. Sanitizer API and the new HTML setter methods and streaming methods.
  2. moveBefore()
  3. Transparency support for VP9 video codec and animated AVIF as well as general AVIF interoperability improvements and progressive rendering support for both JPEG XL and AVIF
  4. CSS Link Parameters for styling SVG
  5. focusgroup
  6. Unprefix box-decoration-break
  7. Support justify-self in block layouts rather than only for grid items and absolutely-positioned elements
  8. AccentColor should reflect accent-color
  9. CSS gap decorations
  10. flex-wrap: balance
  11. Responsive iframes
  12. align-content for button/input centering
  13. CSS grid-lanes (aka Masonry layout)
  14. Speculation Rules API

“Pre-op”

Web developers have some official avenues to express their sentiments on emerging web standards. There’s Interop and there’s the developer-signals GitHub repo, where you can vote for features via 👍 emoji reactions to issues. However, both Interop and the developer-signals repo are designed for features that are already fairly far-along in the standards process. For early-stage proposals, its harder for developers to make their sentiments known. So here is my personal “pre-op” wishlist of features that are too early to raise for Interop 2027:

1. appearance: base and the entire CSS Forms spec

For decades developers have asked for a way to style native HTML inputs and form controls. This is the most significant advancement on the horizon for UI development. Early-stage implementation work has started in Chromium.

2. Better standards for implementing dark mode

Sadly, it looks like the Web Preferences API is probably not going to happen. I’ve previously written about the frustrating disconnect between <meta name="color-scheme"> and the prefers-color-scheme media query. A recent update to the CSS spec has changed the specified behaviour so that <meta name="color-scheme"> should impact the media query — but sadly no browser has implemented this yet. You can upvote the relevant Chromium implementation issue.

3. CSS image-animation

The argument that you should just use a HTML <video> element is fairly compelling, but I’d still like to see more control over animated images (“gifs”). The CSS image-animation property is implemented behind a flag in Chrome Canary.

4. PUT, PATCH and DELETE methods for HTML forms

5. DOM Templating API

This spec still needs a lot of work.

6. Better control over anchor positioning

When adding animations to elements making use of anchor positioning, it would be useful to be able to change the transform-origin and translate depending on the position of the anchor.

7. Persistent Widgets

8. Everything Open UI is working on

There’s a lot… but work on new menu elements is particularly compelling.

9. Signals in JavaScript

There was initially a huge amount of engagement on this topic from authors of JavaScript frameworks. Its been slow going since then and the proposal seems stuck at stage 1…

10. <input type="date"> support for Temporal

After that, the internet is finished and browser engineers can spend the rest of time quashing bugs.