Interop 2026 launches with 20 focus areas, Chrome 145 ships multicol wrapping, and CSS gets clever with contrast-color approximations
Published on 18.02.2026
Interop 2026: The Fifth Year of Making Browsers Agree
TLDR: Interop 2026 has launched with 20 focus areas across CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, including 15 brand new ones like scroll-driven animations, contrast-color(), advanced attr(), and WebTransport. All major browser vendors -- Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Igalia -- are on board for what is shaping up to be the most ambitious year yet.
Announcing Interop 2026 (WebKit)
Chrome 145: Column Wrapping, the Origin API, and Device Bound Sessions
TLDR: Chrome 145 ships column wrapping for multi-column layouts, a new Origin API for safer origin comparisons, and Device Bound Session Credentials to protect against cookie theft. The DevTools update is equally substantial with MCP server improvements and significantly better performance profiling.
Cloudflare's Markdown for Agents: The Web Gets a Second Language
TLDR: Cloudflare now automatically converts HTML pages to markdown when AI agents request them with an Accept: text/markdown header. This reduces token usage by roughly 80% and introduces content negotiation as a first-class pattern for agent-readable web content.
Introducing Markdown for Agents
Approximating contrast-color() With Pure CSS Today
TLDR: Since contrast-color() is only in Safari and Firefox so far, a clever CSS-only approximation using OKLCH lightness and round() gives you automatic black-or-white text selection in a single line: oklch(from var(--color) round(1.21 - L) 0 0). It closely matches APCA contrast calculations.
Approximating contrast-color() With Other CSS Features
Modern CSS Snippets: A Reference for Replacing JavaScript With CSS
TLDR: modern-css.com is a curated collection of old-versus-modern CSS comparisons showing how features like anchor positioning, scroll-driven animations, container queries, popover, and field-sizing can replace what previously required JavaScript libraries or complex workarounds.
The EU Moves to Ban Infinite Scrolling
TLDR: The European Union is pushing to ban infinite scrolling on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook as part of enforcing the Digital Services Act, arguing that the design pattern is addictive and harmful to users, particularly minors.
The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling
Gwtar: A Static, Single-File, Efficient HTML Archive Format
TLDR: Gwtar is a new polyglot HTML archival format that solves a long-standing trilemma: it is simultaneously static (self-contained), single-file, and efficient (lazy-loading) by using a JavaScript header that calls window.stop() and then serves assets via HTTP range requests into an appended tarball.
Gwtar: a static efficient single-file HTML format
Justifying text-wrap: pretty -- A Bug Report Disguised as Typography History
TLDR: Safari shipped text-wrap: pretty in 2025, but combining it with text-align: justify produces ugly results because the smart line-breaking algorithm targets a width slightly narrower than the container, and justification then inflates whitespace to fill the gap.
CSS Selectors Level 5: The Working Draft Drops
TLDR: The W3C published a new working draft of CSS Selectors Level 5, introducing pseudo-classes like :local-link, :interest-source/:interest-target, :blank, :heading(), time-dimensional selectors, the :state() pseudo-class for custom elements, and the column combinator.