The CSS platform keeps handing us toys, and this batch is mostly about using the newest ones well, starting with View Transitions pushed past the spec.
Bramus Van Damme’s Cranking View Transitions Up to 11 is his Beyond Tellerrand talk write-up (slides and a recording of the sister talk are linked). The premise is delightfully reckless: push the View Transition API past its documented limits: combine it with scroll-driven animations, trigger it automatically with a MutationObserver, even resurrect classic IE’s page transitions through this modern API. It’s the tinkerer’s tour of the feature, and coming from a Chrome DevRel engineer it’s the good kind of “here’s what happens when you ignore the spec’s guardrails.”
Una Kravets’ Modern CSS Theming is the one to actually implement. She combines three newly-Baseline features into a genuinely nice theming system: light-dark() as the macro foundation (it reads computed color-scheme, so it’s inherited and composable, not a media query), a per-shadow-layer trick to swap drop shadows in light mode for glowing borders in dark, contrast-color() for one-line accessible text on any background, and @container style() queries that branch into hue-tinted palettes instead of harsh black/white. An optional @function --elevation() cleans it up at the cost of narrower support. This separates page-level theming from per-card micro-theming in a way I hadn’t seen laid out so cleanly.
Manuel Matuzovic’s field-sizing for selects is a small, satisfying fix for an old annoyance: by default a <select> is as wide as its longest option, so a control showing “Utrecht” stays as wide as “Scheveningen.” field-sizing: content lets the width follow the selected option instead. One line, exactly the kind of platform detail worth filing away.
Sebastiano Guerriero’s Lab01 (the CodyHouse founder) is a gallery of “best-in-class” UI experiments: a dozen small, polished interface studies you can open and inspect. Pure frontend inspiration; good to keep in the tab you open when a layout needs a spark. And Saazio is a conversion-focused SaaS website template built on Next.js 16, React 19, Tailwind 4, TypeScript, and shadcn/ui, with the usual marketing pages ready to customize, a sensible starting point if you’re standing up a product site and don’t want to design the hero for the hundredth time. (Relevant to your own publishing-tool and SaaS projects.)