2025; I think every front-end developer should know how to enable page transitions, transition a <dialog>, popover, and <details>, animate light n' dark gradient text, type safe their CSS system, and add springy easing to animation. AI is not going to give you this CSS.

The ability to use attr() references in CSS is getting more powerful. Shipping in Chrome 133 (stable rollout beginning next week!), this highly-requested feature gives you ability to supercharge attributes and use them in CSS beyond simple strings! You can reference colors, numbers, percentages, named values as custom identifiers, and more.

In the last year alone, I have seen two completely different clients in two completely different industries sink months and months into framework upgrades. Collectively, they’ve spent tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars rewriting entire projects just to maintain feature parity with the previous iteration. This is not meaningful or productive work—it is time sunk into merely keeping themselves at square one.

Whether for graphic designs like text along borders, textual annotations, or even dynamic texts like error messaging, CSS offset is an easy-to-use option to achieve all of that. We can position the elements along the reference boxes of their containing parent elements, rotate them, and even add animation if needed.

If you do it anyway, don’t make it worse by adding a title (or other accessible name technique) to that link. If you have a boss / client insisting the entire figure must be clickable / tappable, then consider a block link. It’s not ideal, but it is less overtly user hostile.