The Web You Didn't Know You Had

Every year or so, something on the web makes me stop and think, wait, you can do that now? A layout that used to need a library, a component that used to need JavaScript, now just working in plain HTML and CSS. I have been building for the web for about a decade, and that feeling only keeps happening more often.

Here is the catch: most developers never find out. I keep meeting people who have never seen what the browser can do today, features that shipped a year or two ago that most of us still have not noticed. There is also a new twist in 2026. The AI assistants we now build with have the same blind spot. Ask one to build something for the web and it reaches for the old answer, more JavaScript or another dependency, because its knowledge cutoff hides most of what the platform shipped recently.

So this talk is a tour of what the browser can actually do now, features that make you rethink how much code you really need. A lot of it quietly replaces things you used to reach for a library to do: native carousels, dialogs, theming, container queries, scroll-driven animations, view transitions, and more. Some of it is genuinely new, like rendering live HTML inside a canvas or letting an AI agent control your page. And I will show how to point your AI tools at the right feature instead of the old one.

It is practical and demo-heavy. You will see real code, walk away with things you can try the next morning, and maybe get that “Wait, the web can do that?” moment for yourself.