Friday Issue No. 161
This week’s JavaScript side leans into performance and platform reach. TanStack Table v9 experiments with shared prototypes to cut memory usage dramatically, Drizzle’s npm troubles turn into a practical guide to avoiding package size limits, and Deno 2.9 ships a new Desktop runtime so you can turn web frameworks into native-like apps for Linux, Windows and macOS. Astro 7 joins the Rust wave with a rewritten compiler, Vite 8 and Rolldown under the hood for builds that are 15 to 61 percent faster in real projects.
On the HTML and CSS side, there is a serious look at grid lanes and why Masonry-like layouts can be hostile to screen readers and keyboard users when visual order diverges from the DOM. Una’s modern CSS theming demo shows how @property, light dark(), contrast color(), @container style() and others combine into powerful design systems, alongside a hopeful proposal to simplify responsive images and retire cryptic srcset strings.
Rounding things out, the mixed section looks at how much your browser can infer about you, a CSS game, the worrying FIFA front-end only hack story, and a long but rewarding saga about colour perception, display gamuts and why even modern screens show only a slice of the colours you see in the real world. Happy reading!
JavaScript News
Tanstack Table v9 memory performance
Interesting approach to saving memory by creating a shared prototype across rows.
https://tanstack.com/blog/tanstack-table-v9-memory-performance
Why Drizzle ORM couldn’t publish new releases on NPM for a month
A detailed post about hitting npm’s packument size limits and what that means for projects that publish too many versions too quickly.
https://www.vlt.io/blog/packument-size-limits
Deno 2.9
Deno 2.9 introduces Deno Desktop, a way to wrap your web app or framework into a desktop style application, with support for Linux x64/arm64, Windows x64 and macOS x64/arm64. It is still early, but it is an interesting option if you prefer web tech over native stacks and want a single codebase on both web and desktop.
Astro 7
Astro 7 rewrites its .astro compiler in Rust, upgrades to Vite 8 and Rust powered Rolldown, and reports build times that are 15 to 61 percent faster across real projects. It is very much part of the broader Rust wave in JavaScript tooling and a good reminder that performance often comes from rethinking the core pipeline, not just the edges.
https://astro.build/blog/astro-7/
Wirewiki
Minimal, clean UI for looking up domain information without needing command line tools or registrar specific dashboards. Handy when you just want to quickly check DNS, WHOIS or related records in one place.
HTML & CSS News
Grid Lanes and Accessibility
Grid lanes (Masonry like layouts) can look lovely, but as Matuzo and others point out, they raise serious accessibility concerns. The main issue is that the visual order of items on the grid can diverge completely from the DOM order, so screen reader users and people navigating with a keyboard encounter content in a different sequence than sighted users do.
https://matuzo.at/blog/2026/grid-lanes-accessibility
Modern CSS Theming
By combining modern CSS tools such as @property, light dark(), contrast color(), @container style() and custom functions, you can build rich theming systems without relying heavily on JavaScript. Una’s post is a great showcase of how these newer primitives fit together and why CSS itself is now a powerful design system engine
https://una.im/modern-css-theming/
Ending Responsive Images
There is a real chance we can retire long srcset strings like srcset="photo-650.jpg 650w, photo-960.jpg 960w" in favour of simpler, more robust responsive image patterns. This post explores where srcset struggles, what a better future might look like and why improving browser behaviour could remove a lot of boilerplate from our templates.
https://cloudfour.com/thinks/ending-responsive-images/
Clickable table rows are a bad idea
Clickable rows may seem convenient, but from an accessibility perspective, they are almost always a bad pattern. This post walks through the practical dos and don’ts, showing how table semantics, focus states and clear affordances matter more than making the entire row behave like a giant link.
https://www.tempertemper.net/blog/clickable-table-rows-are-a-bad-idea
CSS states
We all know :hover and :active, but there are many more states and selectors that tie into JavaScript events and behaviour. Towards the end of the post, there are some intriguing ideas about how far to push CSS for state management and where it starts to blur into responsibilities we typically give to JavaScript.
https://css-tricks.com/css-states-and-javascript-events/
CSS only image gallery of rotating 3D cubes
A beautifully crafted CSS-only image gallery built from rotating 3D cubes on CodePen. It is one of those demos that both inspires and quietly reminds you how far modern CSS and 3D effects have come.
https://codepen.io/NiklasKnaack/pen/VYPbjrG
Mixed News
How much does the browser know about you?
Most of these signals are technically “known” to people who follow privacy discussions, but this piece presents them in a fresh, slightly unsettling way. It is a good reminder of how much can be inferred from things like fingerprints, timing, hardware and network details, even without obvious tracking scripts.
https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken
CSS Quake
What a world: we now have games built purely with HTML and CSS. CSS Quake is a playful, technically impressive example that pushes layout, transforms and state handling to their limits without a traditional JavaScript game engine.
Fifa hack
It is hard to believe this story is real, but the write-up suggests the biggest sports event on earth relied on front-end validation for a critical ticketing flow. The post breaks down how that happened, what was exploited and why server-side checks are non-negotiable for anything involving money or identity.
https://bobdahacker.com/blog/fifa-hack
Saga about colours
This is long and more philosophical than my usual picks, but very much worth it. You come away realising that your screen only shows a subset of the colours you see in the real world, even on modern phones and laptops, and that our eyes themselves are not great at distinguishing some parts of the spectrum. There is also a delightful aside about traffic lights and why the “green” light is not quite the colour you think it is.
https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-colors-your-screen-cant-show-you/