GoKawiil
Tech News
A developer roundup describes the state of JavaScript heading into 2026, covering the ECMAScript 2025 spec finalized in June 2025 alongside the runtimes, frameworks and tooling surrounding the language. Key language additions include native iterator helper methods such as map, filter, take and drop with lazy evaluation, plus new Set methods for comparing collections like union, intersection and difference.
A WIRED column examines the long-running debate over whether CSS counts as a true programming language, noting that despite lacking compilation or runtime errors, it has grown from roughly 50 properties in 1996 to hundreds today. The piece highlights developers like Cassidy Williams, who built a database-query engine in CSS and competed in the inaugural March MadCSS tournament, showcasing feats such as a CSS-only recreation of Doom and 3D rendering engines.
Researchers examined how cognitive resilience—an individual's capacity to maintain mental function despite brain pathology—can help forecast progression to Alzheimer's dementia. The findings, published on Nature.com, suggest that measuring resilience adds predictive value beyond standard biomarkers of disease.
A web design tutorial addresses a common flexbox alignment issue: when a list item's icon sits beside wrapping text, using align-items: center leaves the icon vertically centered against the whole text block instead of matching the first line. The author demonstrates using align-items: start combined with a small transform: translateY offset on the icon to correct the visual gap caused by line-height spacing above the text glyphs.
Mozilla worked with Lincoln Loop and a design lead to rebuild Firefox.com using only modern, native CSS, dropping preprocessors like Sass entirely. The project exported custom properties straight from design files and used CSS Grid and Flexbox, building a system of more than 70 components and 25 page templates as Wagtail components so non-engineers can assemble pages. The site now supports 19 locales, with a lightweight branded stylesheet ensuring older browsers still get basic accessible styling.
A tech conference speaker and MC reflects on encouraging attendees at events like SmashingConf Freiburg and CSS Day to approach and talk with speakers, describing efforts to physically connect shy attendees with speakers at after-parties and dinners. The author notes that the informal feedback speakers once got via Twitter has largely disappeared, leaving many without direct affirmation of their talks.
CSS-Tricks, the web development site DigitalOcean acquired in 2022 and briefly revived in mid-2024 under editor Geoff Graham, has gone inactive again with no explanation from its owner. Meanwhile, DigitalOcean quickly arranged a $3 million donation to Omarchy, a set of Arch Linux scripts led by David Heinemeier Hansson, and has also stopped small monthly payments to GNOME and Flathub infrastructure.
A Nature editorial argues that the US National Institutes of Health should not adopt simplistic bibliometric measures, such as citation counts or journal impact factors, to judge the value of research it funds. It warns that basing funding or hiring decisions on these numbers risks distorting scientific priorities and rewarding easily counted output over genuinely important work.
A retrospective catalogs odd, non-standard CSS behaviors that browsers—especially old versions of Internet Explorer—have accepted over the years, such as property prefixes with asterisks, underscores, or hyphens, and near-arbitrary strings after an exclamation mark being treated as !important. These tricks let developers target specific browsers at a time when CSS lacked conditional logic and browser rendering was wildly inconsistent.
A Nature Briefing Chat episode examines the widely taught story about the Bunsen burner's origins and finds the popular version doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The discussion revisits the historical record to clarify who actually contributed to the device's development and how the myth took hold.
The piece revisits CSS tools built for foldable devices, prompted by Google's Pixel Fold launch. It details media queries like horizontal-viewport-segments and vertical-viewport-segments, plus environment variables that report each screen segment's width, height and position so layouts can adapt automatically to different hinge geometries.
New research measuring microplastic transport in rivers found that the amount of plastic particles flowing into the ocean is significantly higher than previous estimates suggested. The findings indicate that existing models have been undercounting how much plastic debris rivers actually deliver to marine environments.