Comparing Interop 2024 Choices to the Popular Vote

Here’s what made the list this year:

• Accessibility
• CSS Nesting
• Custom Properties
• Declarative Shadow DOM
• Font size adjust
• HTTPS URLs for WebSocket
• IndexedDB
• Layout
• Pointer and Mouse Events
• Popover
• Relative Color Syntax
• requestVideoFrameCallback
• Scrollbar Styling
• @starting-style and transition-behavior
• Text Directionality
• text-wrap: balance
• URL

A little while back I measured the “popular vote” on features based on positive GitHub emoji reactions on the threads.

So! How well did what was actually chosen stack up to the popular vote? Let’s see.

• #5) Popover
• #12) CSS Nesting
• #10) Relative Color Syntax
• #26) text-wrap: balance
• #22) Declarative Shadow DOM
• #33) Accessibility — This is a grouping of several, so I took the highest on the list.
• (Not on list) Custom Properties
• #52) Scrollbar Styling — scrollbar-gutter was actually #9, but styling I feel like is a different concern and more aligned with scrollbar-width, which is shipping in Chrome you should know.
• #53) @starting-style and transition-behavior
• #62) URL
• #81) Font size adjust
• #84) HTTPS URLs for WebSocket
• #83) IndexedDB
• #89) requestVideoFrameCallback
• (Not on list) Layout
• (Not on list) Pointer and Mouse Events
• (Not on list) Text Directionality

Interesting results I’d say! It’s kind of all over the map.

By no means to I expect the final results to map perfectly, or at all, to the popular vote. I’m sure there are a million considerations, not the least of which is how ready any of the proposals even is for interop work. For instance, as excited as I am about View Transitions, they are only implemented in Chrome, so it’s not exactly “interop” work when the implementations to compare don’t even exist. Interop is more about shoring up the cracks in existing implementations with testable results.

So as far as “making existing implementations work better together”, I’d say this is a pretty nice list.

I’d say I’m most excited about popover, since it’s such a common UI pattern you gotta love seeing the web platform help with that. And most surprised by the relative color syntax. I absolutely love the syntax, but I thought it had petered out for some reason so it’s delighting to see it come back to life in a way that’ll nearly guarantee we have it cross-browser.