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Posted by encyclopedism 1 day ago

HTML Can Do That(chrisburnell.com)
438 points | 121 comments
dajonker 2 hours ago|
Popover, dialog, invoker commands, our entire production app uses these everywhere and it works really well! The fact that dialogs and popovers are rendered on the "top layer" and that nested popovers are also automatically stacked on top of each other and have 'cascading close' shows how well these standards were designed.

The only hard thing is still to position a popover near the element that triggers it, such as when you want to create a context menu that has to render above/below the button that triggered it. There is anchor positioning in CSS now but support is still limited and I find it hard to wrap my head around.

LLMs are also terrible at these new standards. If they even know about them, they often think they're not baseline yet and they have almost zero training data compared to the giant mountain of weird JS and CSS that people had to use before the introduction of these standards.

commandlinefan 6 minutes ago||
> often think they're not baseline yet

I'm not an LLM, but that was my immediate thought - how new does a browser have to be to support these and which browsers am I excluding by using these features?

nozzlegear 1 hour ago|||
> The only hard thing is still to position a popover near the element that triggers it, such as when you want to create a context menu that has to render above/below the button that triggered it. There is anchor positioning in CSS now but support is still limited and I find it hard to wrap my head around.

I was going to suggest anchor positioning. I found it difficult to wrap my head around too, but once it clicks it's pretty simple. As a bonus, you can use it to position many other things than just popovers.

sublinear 2 hours ago|||
I'm curious how many people are involved in the design of your app and what their concerns are.

Testing for accessibility and on mobile devices has a tendency to derail the best intentions. What tools are you using for those concerns? I'm not asking because I need advice. I'm asking because I want to know what you or your team did.

vee-kay 51 minutes ago||
[dead]
dematz 5 hours ago||
This comment by yurishimo should not be [dead], imo

>Just a heads up but datalist is not really a great solution if you need a strong contract. The user can still type whatever they want into the field and there is no fuzzy filtering or typo mitigation. Once you add those requirements, a library that gives you a more fully featured combobox is likely going to make a lot of sense in your project.

It is true! HTML can do a lot of cool stuff, it might get you 100% of the way depending on what you're doing. But if you have a lot of forms where users pick from a value set, and want to enforce no other strings and get a good search experience, datalist does not get you there.

yurishimo 2 hours ago||
Thanks for the vouch! The rest of the article was indeed good but I find a lot of value in hacker news comments precisely because someone comes back to the comments and lays out why what I just read might need a different perspective. If you just want to see cool stuff that a browser can technically do, we are all capable of reading the Chrome dev blog, but we come to HN for a wider perspective. Someone telling a war story about how some little tidbit came back to bite them is also valuable (imo).
honr 3 hours ago|||
I mildly disagree. You still have to validate what the browser gives you. The user could have edited the "strong contract" using browser dev tools.

So, let the user type, then validate in javascript if you want instant feedback (by changing colors, say, to red / orange), but ideally don't fully block it from being seen by the server. And do the real validation on the server side. This is what I found to be fairly robust, while allowing mitigations if a bad rollout breaks something (delivering to clients is slower than updating something on the server side, most often).

jonahx 1 hour ago|||
GP was addressing the client-side UX, not backend validation, which is an orthogonal concern.
yurishimo 2 hours ago||||
Where did I say to forgo backend validation? Of course you validate on the backend as well, but the better UX would be to prevent the user from entering a bad value to begin with, assuming it fits within your team’s performance budget.

I’m not advocating for willy-nilly package inclusion, just highlighting a current shortcoming of datalist that is often not mentioned in these sorts of articles.

c-hendricks 3 hours ago|||
That solves the validation portion, but not the rest of the UX issues
Gualdrapo 4 hours ago|||
I seem to recall there was a proposal to add such thing to <select>s
bulder 4 hours ago||
I definitely remember seeing a post by a Chromium maintainer talking about starting development on a proof of concept implementation and surveying for semantics.
kotaKat 4 hours ago||
(iirc if you have [showdead] on you can click on the timestamp to the comment and will get a [vouch] option as a reverse-flag, fwiw. i see it and don't have showdead enabled, so enough people have re-vouched it!)
jamescun 5 hours ago||
I'm that minutia in your statistics that is still rocking NoScript in 2026, enabling JavaScript on a site-by-site basis, but this is increasingly difficult with the modern web.

Hopefully these and others modern HTML features gain adoption, along with realizing perhaps a Single Page Application isn't necessary in most instances.

I don't often have to write frontend code, but when I do, there is very little in terms of interactivity you cannot do with HTML these days, worst case a little sprinkle of something like HTMX.

edparcell 11 minutes ago||
I got frustrated with sites that should just be documents bolting on a pile of javascript libraries, third-party requests etc so I made a standard for sites that are just documents, and wrote a checker for document-only pages. For SSL, the thing that actually changed the web was browsers flagging non-SSL - probably similar is needed here. https://certifiedweb10.org/ if you're interested.
bee_rider 4 hours ago|||
Thank goodness you exist, the fingerprinters will be confused as to which one of the two of us went to their website!
jamescun 4 hours ago|||
How? There are dozens of us! DOZENS!
Perz1val 3 hours ago||
How would you count?
steanne 3 hours ago||
"you don't have to, they'll tell you."

(+1)

jccalhoun 2 hours ago|||
i'm right there with you!
gunalx 4 hours ago|||
Single page applications are one of the most anoying web patterns i know of. Please just let me have one page for each ting to do so i actually can bookmark it properly.
phyzix5761 4 hours ago|||
Once backend and frontend became two separate teams frontend people didn't want to keep asking backend to make logic changes for state, so frontend took things into their own hands. The mistake was making it two separate teams.
tyre 3 hours ago||||
This is possible and, in my experience building them, the norm. SPAs have routers and update navigation state, including history for browser Back/Forward
gunalx 3 hours ago||
Yes true. But also way to often neglected.
ThunderSizzle 3 hours ago||||
Ive made SPAs in Blazor that make it a point to update the URL whenever a "navigation" occurs. I also made it a point to ensure refreshing or loading the URL restored the state.

It's a small problem compared to the ease of use for development you can gain via Blazor, so I don't see any reason not to solve it.

culi 3 hours ago|||
On the other hand, converting a SPA to a PWA is often a breeze
evenhash 2 hours ago|||
One thing you notice running NoScript is how prevalent Google is.

Even if a site doesn’t monetize with Google Ads, there’s a decent chance it’s pulling a script from ajax.googleapis.com, and Google still knows that you visited the site from the Referer of the script download.

zelphirkalt 3 hours ago|||
This is part of how I judge how well made or how shitty a website is. If it requires scripts from a dozen third parties, then it usually sucks and one can easily recognize when not much effort has been put into making it.
nozzlegear 1 hour ago|||
Does HTMX work with NoScript? Doesn't it require JS?
ipsod 1 hour ago||
Nope, doesn't work. Doesn't stop you from making it a PWA, though.
djoldman 4 hours ago||
oh my. Looks like NoScript is way better than what I've been using. Thanks!

https://noscript.net/

silvestrov 4 hours ago||
I'd really wish I could force ISO format for the date input as the current "platform native" is confusing for some users when the OS use a different language than the web page that is shown.

For some multi-country companies it makes sense to have all admin pages in English no matter the underlying OS language. Imagine sending a screenshot where the OS date format is different from what everybody else expects from an English page.

crote 2 hours ago||
Alternatively: have the <time> element actually do something by hooking it up to the new Moment API and having it display the specified timestamp in the user's locale. That would at least provide an easy way to have the input format and the display format be the same.

But yes, there's also a very good argument to be made in favor of having such localized elements follow the content's `lang` attribute - potentially with a `lang="initial"` to reset it to "whatever the user has configured for their OS".

hk1337 3 hours ago|||
I'd be okay with regional date format for the user but it always submits as ISO 8601 date format.
crote 2 hours ago||
That's already how it works, is it not?
jimmygrapes 2 hours ago||
Dealing with this right now. Got some people whose devices are set to display dates as dd/mm/yyyy and the janky pay submission form records it verbatim rather than translate to its internal mm/dd/yyyy format. If it's invalid date it will reject, but a guy submitted for August 4 and got denied for the system recording it as April 8. Spreadsheet MS Forms nonsense. Nobody cares.
hk__2 4 hours ago||
Related to this, I’d love that HTML natively support sortable tables. This is a common need but every single time I have to reimplement it.
jwr 1 hour ago||
This is… not obvious. It's only easy if you want the simplistic approach of sorting lexicographically or numerically. But in more complex tables, you will often encounter cases where the data representation for sorting is different from data representation for display.

Of course most JavaScript-based tables get this wrong, too.

hk__2 57 minutes ago||
You could have a `sortkey` attribute, a bit like <option> that has a `value` attribute in case the value you want is different from the value you display.
hahn-kev 2 hours ago|||
I feel like there's so few times it would actually work how I want it that it seems like there's little point.
wild_egg 4 hours ago|||
You want client side table sorting?

It's really easy to do this with server rendered HTML. Put a link with the sort param in the column headers and be done.

mxuribe 3 hours ago|||
I used to do this in the early 2000s! Some folks back then would ask whether i was afraid that clicking a link (which loads a "new" web page) would slow things down and create an awful experience for users...but, my team and I would really focus on keeping web pages slim/lightweight to begin with...so it rarely was a problem. I don't think we were geniuses or anything like that, but keeping things light (always and from the beginning) enabled us to "cheat" (like this "hack" of the links in the column headers) in ways that were beneficial but with very low risk. Sometimes it took an extra moment or two at the beginning of an effort...but it ALWAYS paid off down the road, and in many different ways.
wild_egg 3 hours ago||
It still works exceptionally well in 2026 and generally creates better and faster experiences than an SPA with far, far less code.
hk__2 54 minutes ago|||
You don’t need an SPA for that; Wikipedia has client-side sorted tables for example.
culi 3 hours ago|||
I hate what it does to my back button
hnal943 2 hours ago||
HTMX is the solution
zarzavat 2 hours ago|||
So instead of using JS to sort the table directly, now you make a JS fetch() request to sort the table?!

It does make sense in one situation, if the table is a large server-side paginated one and the sorting is really an ORDER BY clause. But for a basic table that fits entirely on the client, it doesn't make sense at all. There are tiny JS libraries that will make <table>s sortable when you add a particular class name.

nozzlegear 1 hour ago|||
Trading one javascript for another?
xboxnolifes 2 hours ago|||
I want tables that can be sorted on multiple columns without triggering a page refresh on every click.
wild_egg 1 hour ago||
View Transitions are your friend
krapp 4 hours ago||
That's what javascript is supposed to be for. All of this is what javascript is supposed to be for.

HTML describes layout, CSS describes style, JS adds interactivity.

Want sortable tables? Get a jquery plugin and spend five minutes, done.

This was all solved a decade or more ago.

hk__2 52 minutes ago|||
> Want sortable tables? Get a jquery plugin and spend five minutes, done.

I want sortable tables without having to rely on a third-party plugin to a third-party library. HTML describes content, not just layout. It would be a `sortable` attribute on the table, just like you already have attributes that have nothing to do with layout such as `autocomplete` or `aria-*`.

krapp 25 minutes ago||
Everyone already complains that browsers are too bloated and now you want to have every browser support sortable tables when a single, simple JS file would work?
zephen 1 hour ago|||
> HTML describes layout

News to me.

krapp 1 hour ago||
That's understandable, because almost no one actually works with HTML directly anymore, but it's true. HTML contains tags like <H> for headers, <p> for paragraphs, <br> for line breaks <pre> for prerendered text, <ol> and <ul> for ordered and unordered lists, <table> for tables as well as <main>,<div>,<header>,<section>,<nav>,<article>,<aside>,<summary> and <footer> to both explicitly and implicitly describe the layout of an HTML document. In fact, "HTML" itself is an acronym (HyperText Markup Language) in which the "Markup" describes the function of HTML to "mark up" text in a similar way that editors once did in the print industry, describing which parts of the text should be bold, italicized, etc. or divided up and in what way.
crab_galaxy 1 hour ago||
HTML describes the structure of a document, not really the layout.

If HTML had <inline> <block> <column> <row> or <grid> tags, sure. But CSS determines the layout via display/position properties.

krapp 32 minutes ago||
<span> is inline

<div> is block

<table>,<tr> and <td> are your grid, row and column.

CSS improves on describing layout with positioning but HTML was still doing that before CSS even came along.

aitchnyu 4 hours ago||
Saw Grouped <details>, ctrl+F'd the hidden content and it opened and highlighted the text in Firefox. Was waiting for this fix ever since I learned about details.
culi 2 hours ago|
You can also control this behavior for almost any hidden element with the `hidden="until-found"` attribute

https://css-tricks.com/covering-hiddenuntil-found/

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

hakesson 5 hours ago||
Yeah, I'm a great fan of both HTML and CSS "can do that". I find more useful things on the CSS side like :has, keyframes and container queries. Why duplicate code when you have it for free :)
Sohcahtoa82 5 hours ago|
Yeah I've seen a page that described a whole bunch of things you can do with CSS. So many animation options!
stagas 3 hours ago||
I started textlog.cc as an experiment to see how far I can go without introducing JS. It turns out, pretty far! If you exclude the Web Push notifications which required a Service Worker script, all the rest is server-side rendered React. As a visitor, with all the hover cards and popovers you would think there is some JS going on, but it’s all HTML-only. I am enjoying very much the constraint and it hasn’t hindered any progress. It’s a proof a lot can be achieved by just HTML.
florianherrengt 2 hours ago||
I’m a big fan of simple things but I always go back to using a library or framework because it’s much easier to create a good, consistent UX
jdlshore 5 hours ago|
The “hidden until found” feature surprised me. What’s the use case for something like that?
dofm 5 hours ago||
Looks like it's basically like a one way show-hidden mechanism, but the browser's built-in search will pop it open on matches.

So you could use it for additional notes, things like "view pricing terms" or "show exclusions" on product listings — stuff people need to read only when they need to read it — without it being hidden from them if they search for it.

dspillett 3 hours ago|||
It won't be an intended use case, but it might be a convenient place to put poisoned content for the “benefit” of scrapers…

Though humans will accidentally find it too, so using a details tag with appropriate summary as a warning would be more friendly than just hidden content. It'll still get opened, but the user at least has a way of closing it again afterwards.

Also before using it I'd want to check what old UAs including accessibility tools tend to do when they hit a value that they don't recognise for the hidden="" attribute - would what they don't recognise as a valid value result in defaulting to the content being hidden or visible/read/other?

wvbdmp 4 hours ago|||
Pretty cool! I’ve been using <details> for this. One example would be a collapsible tree hierarchy of our organization that you can CTRL+F and still find collapsed teams and people. Or an accordion, or anything collapsible, really.
megaman821 1 hour ago|||
I use it for tabbed content. That way search will reveal the tab and content on page search match.
pseudosavant 2 hours ago|||
There is a common accessibility pattern where the first tab focusable item is a "Skip to content" link in the top left corner. The link is initially hidden until you tab to it. That is the only use case I could think of when checking it out.
akersten 2 hours ago|||
On a big page with lots of collapsed content, I want control+f to search it and find anything in the collapsed sections without having to manually expand them all before I hit control+f
seki285 5 hours ago||
One thing that comes to mind is JS-less image preview, clicking on an image thumbnail reveals the full preview.
dspillett 4 hours ago||
Though that wouldn't have a method of closing the full image afterwards, if you have a few thumbnails and want one full to be open at a time (closing when the next is selected).
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