No matter how long you’ve been a front-end developer, there is always something new to learn, and every year that goes by it seems our dev world expands more and more. New features and trends come and go, CSS releases 100 new features, and about 100,000,000 new JS libraries are released. I’ve decided that each year I’m going to pick a couple of the things I’m most interested in and do some deep dives into working with them in every day projects.

It used to be that it took years, sometimes decades, to get new features in CSS, nowadays it feels like there’s a new feature every month. Last year in 2025, :has() was the newest feature I used everywhere. It made so many improvements to my code – from small hover interactions, to less verbose selectors. These upcoming features are the ones I’m most looking forward to using next.

Styling Gaps

My biggest annoyance about grid and flexbox is the inability to actually style the gaps between columns and rows without using a pseudo selector hack. Thankfully the CSS gods have heard our prayers and grid gap styling is on its way.

Gap decoration gives us the ability to style these spaces – and what’s better is that they sort of act like an absolutely positioned item in that they don’t take up “space” in the layer stack – meaning you can easily insert these to any existing gap without a lot of interference.

Masonry Grids

I hate masonry grid layouts because they’re such a PIA to implement. You either need javascript or a dumber version of the layout using regular grid that doesn’t adapt very well at all.

Thankfully a native masonry layout is on it’s way – of course, this layout has gone out of style in the past few years, but I’m betting it’ll make a comeback when Grid masonry becomes widely supported.

Anchoring Positioning

Anchoring positioning is already available in most browsers! Another CSS feature replacing a bunch of JS (which is my fav kind of CSS feature), anchor positioning will allow us to set a button and popup and have them connected together without a single line of JS. (this is for things like small popups, tooltips, etc, not dialogs/modals). I’m looking forward to rewriting my popover logic soon thanks to this.

Scroll Anchoring

Another feature I’m looking forward to is scroll anchoring – the ability to stop a page from jumping around when content above continues loading in (especially useful if you’re refreshing a page midscroll, or just a fast scroller downer (legit title) like I am. I’m interested in seeing how seamlessly this works – it’s supposed to be a browser feature, which means you don’t need to touch it unless you want to disable it for some reason.

Continuing with my Javascript

OK, obviously not CSS related, but wanted to drop an update on this one, because I have been learning a ton! Now that I’ve finally grokked vanilla JS well enough, I’m looking forward to taking my JS animation skills up a notch. I’m still not interested in JS as a OOP language, I know I’m old in the thinking that JS is “only” for animations/interactions, but let’s be honest, every single site I visit that’s coded in React has some sort of loading or performance issue. I know it’s the cool thing right now, but trends come and go. The fundamentals are forever.

That being said, I’d love to dive in more to the GSAP library – I’ve used it once or twice for basic stuff, but would love to learn more advanced layer animations with timelines and such. I’m normally not a big fan of JS libraries, but GSAP is pretty awesome and it wouldn’t be used on every site.

What are you looking forward to?

I would love to hear about any new or recently added features you’re looking forward to learning and using!

 

Amber Weinberg

Amber is a freelance front-end developer specializing in semantic and accessible custom WordPress themes. She works with agencies and other freelancers to bring their designs to life using custom ACF flexible layout builds - making them more performant and less buggy while allowing the client easy customization without breaking the design system.