Styling the ::search-text pseudo-element in Chrome 144
Chrome 144 added the ::search-text pseudo-element, which finally lets you style find-in-page highlights. Relative color syntax keeps matches readable on dark themes and saturated backgrounds.
Tag: Accessibility
WordPress 7.0 bug scrub schedule and how to join
The WordPress 7.0 bug scrubs run twice a week from late January to April 8, moving from alpha triage to hunting regressions. Here are the dates, the Slack channels, and what it takes to lead a session.
Testing WordPress 7.0’s customizable navigation overlays
WordPress 7.0 turns the mobile menu overlay into a block-based template part, so a logo or a button goes in without CSS overrides. Here is what to test, plus the open argument about where the markup belongs in the HTML.
Design intent: why pixel perfect layouts keep breaking
Matching a 1440px Figma file coordinate for coordinate produces CSS full of magic numbers that breaks on the first foldable phone or bumped font size. What to agree on with designers instead: tokens, fluid units, and rules about behavior.
First rule of ARIA: your semantic HTML already works
I shipped a button that passed every automated audit and still could not be triggered with a screen reader. The cause was a role attribute I had added for styling, which is the exact thing the first rule of ARIA warns about.
Web Almanac 2025: better CSS, worse accessibility
The 2025 Web Almanac covers 17.2 million sites. Variable fonts and text-wrap are finally common, but median mobile page weight is up 202.8% since 2015 and two thirds of sites strip their focus outlines.
WordPress AI Experiments 0.2.0 adds an Abilities Explorer
Version 0.2.0 of WordPress AI Experiments adds excerpt generation that authors can edit or reject, and an Abilities Explorer screen for testing every registered ability in the browser.
CSS scroll-driven animations instead of 50KB of JavaScript
Notes from the Web Directions Dev Summit in Sydney, where the argument was that CSS scroll-driven animations make most JS scroll libraries pointless. Includes the CSS, and why prefers-reduced-motion is not optional.
Product designer career paths that aren’t a management ladder
Career debt is as real as technical debt. What an annual retrospective, a skills matrix and a translator-style horizontal role look like for a product designer heading into 2026, and why management is not the only way up.
The CSS :drag pseudo-class and the JavaScript it replaces
Notes on the proposed CSS :drag pseudo-class and ::drag-image pseudo-element, and how they replace the dragstart and dragend listeners we currently use to style drag states in WordPress UIs.