New Front-End Features For Designers In 2025
Cosima has been an editor at SmashingMag since 2013. Whenever she’s not writing articles for the weekly Smashing Newsletter, she’s probably working on a … More about Cosima ↬
Component-specific styling, styling parents based on their children, relative colors — the web platform is going through exciting times, and many things that required JavaScript in the past can today be achieved with one simple line of HTML and CSS.
As we are moving towards 2025, it’s a good time to revisit some of the incredible new technologies that are broadly available and supported in modern browsers today. Let’s dive right in and explore how they can simplify your day-to-day work and help you build modern UI components.
Component-specific styling? What has long sounded like a dream to any developer, is slowly but surely becoming reality. Thanks to container queries, we can now query the width and style of the container in which components live.
As Una Kravets points out in her introduction to style queries, this currently only works with CSS custom property values, but there are already some real-world use cases where style queries shine: They come in particularly handy when you have a reusable component with multiple variations or when you don’t have control over all of your styles but need to apply changes in certain cases.
