What’s !important #1: Advent Calendars, CSS Wrapped, Web Platform Updates, and More

Welcome to the first ever What’s !important , a roundup of the best CSS and web development news from the last two weeks. If you’re pressed for time (who isn’t?) or you just can’t stand missing out on anything CSS-related, this is the place to recap: the best CSS/web dev articles from around the web, interesting announcements and quick-read links that we shared, the best of what Chrome, Firefox, and Safari have recently shipped, and more, probably. Let’s dig in! HTMHell Advent Calendar 2025 Manuel Matuzović has created this pretty hellish (all in good fun) HTMHell Advent Calendar 2025 made up of 24 HTML-focused articles - basically, there’s one every day until Christmas Day. Obviously, we’re already 16 fantastic articles in, so you’re in for a real treat with 8 more articles to come. The highlight for me so far is the article on Invoker Commands , which as of this week are supported in all web browsers, so it’s a double win! WebKit flags ::target-text WebKit did a little write-up on ::target-text. And I’m glad they did because I had never heard of it, even though Sunkanmi has an excellent write-up on it here at CSS-Tricks as well . Target text is the text that search engines sometimes highlight when taking you to a web page, but we can actually highlight text ourselves when sending links to other people. ::target-text selects this text so that we can style it, and it’s supported by all web browsers - who knew? Stop using JavaScript to solve CSS problems Chizaram Ken walks us through the latest CSS tricks that we can perform to reduce our reliance on JavaScript , and why we’d want to do that. With CSS growing faster than it’s ever grown before, I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of these articles. We have granular control over hyphenation @eva.town over at Bluesky said that it’d be nice to be able to set hyphenation rules preventing words like “lighter” from hyphenating as “light-er” - but @knowler.dev pointed out that we can, sort of. The property (still waiting for Safari support) enables us to specify the preferred minimum number of characters on either side of the hyphen, which is good enough, I suppose? hyphenate-limit-chars Which color format should we be using? @nadyavoynich.com asked this question , but honestly I still don’t know. Some very good points were made about human-readable formats and color depth, and I’ve kind of settled on . But some UI design tools don’t even support HSL, so? oklch() CSS Wrapped 2025 and State of HTML 2025 It’s that time of the year. We’ve had Spotify’s Wrapped, PlayStation’s Wrap-Up, Duolingo’s Year-in-Review - now it’s time for CSS Wrapped 2025 , all of the latest and greatest things that Chrome did with CSS (and HTML) this year, and State of HTML 2025 , which is about HTML in general. Cool conversations, fun demos, and new browser features In case you missed any of our Quick Hits , here...

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