🔥 Hot take: The self-closing syntax makes HTML easier to learn. It means novices can tell the difference between valid and invalid markup *before* they memorize HTML’s entire vocabulary of element names. Given that HTML is the most novice-friendly language in the web platform, I think that’s a benefit worth preserving. But even to experts, the cognitive process of reading a tag name and remembering whether it’s self-closing is much slower (though both tasks are very fast in absolute terms). Generally, *reading* even one word is much slower than identifying familiar symbols which can be recognized in one go, as images (the "familiar" part is important; unfamiliar symbols introduce way more friction than reading — I’m looking at you WebKit devtools).

A historical day for CSS 😀🎉 If you write any components used and/or styled by others, you know how huge this is! background: if(style(--variant: success), var(--green)); Even if you don’t, this will allow things like: padding: if(var(--2xl), 1em, var(--xl) or var(--m), .5em); GitHub issue: github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/…

This is the single best article on color spaces I have seen around. Well written, well informed and illustrated with interactive visualizations. Truly brilliant work @etportis! ericportis.com/posts/2024/ok…