CSS-Tricks Revives What's !important as a Newsletter on November 10

After a four-year hiatus, the CSS-Tricks newsletter What's !important officially relaunches on November 10, and the site marked the occasion with a final on-site issue — issue #20 — packed with scroll effects, new CSS tools, and a wave of browser releases.

The newsletter's return follows the site's own comeback earlier that week. The author framed the move plainly: readers who subscribe will get "hand-written and hand-curated news, links, and editorials that you can only find there," with the same front-end coverage plus a sponsor and free delivery. Issue #21 lands in a couple of weeks, newsletter-only.

What did the final issue cover?

GTA 6 scroll effects. Rockstar's GTA 6 website — 13 years in the making, as the issue notes — pushes scrolling effects about as far as they go, in the tradition Apple made famous. One caveat for developers testing it: the site oddly doesn't work in Firefox. Kevin Powell published a walkthrough video of the scroll effects, which the issue calls "frankly the most fun that you can have while waiting (and waiting) for GTA 6."

A scrollspy in modern CSS. Mojtaba Seyedi demonstrated how to build a scrollspy — the pattern where a navigation link highlights the section of the page you're currently viewing — using modern CSS alone.

random() demos. Brecht De Ruyte showcased and explained a set of demos built with the new random() function, ranging from generative visuals to practical layout tricks.

Which new techniques made the list?

Icons in 2026 and beyond. Lea Verou wrote a detailed deep dive on implementing icons on the web, covering future CSS features including Linked Parameters, ident(), @mixin and @apply, the @property shorthand, and more.

A universal pseudo-selector. Kilian Valkhof proposed ::*, a pseudo-element counterpart to the universal selector. His reasoning: * doesn't select pseudo-elements, which is why nearly every stylesheet opens with the familiar snippet:

*,
::before,
::after {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}

The problem has grown — ::backdrop and ::details-content are now common in the border-box context — so a single ::* selector would collapse those declarations. The issue's verdict: "I like it!"

Design-system features. Declan Chidlow rounded up new HTML and CSS features useful for design systems. The picks that stood out to the issue's author: text-box, sibling-index(), sibling-count(), @scope, and @custom-media — all handy well beyond design systems.

Adaptive textareas. Adam Argyle shared a CSS-only trick that makes <textarea> elements adapt to their content the way contenteditable elements do naturally, using anchor positioning — which the author nominates as "the most versatile CSS feature right now."

Wavy dividers. A further trick combines random() and shape() to create wavy dividers, in a style the author attributes to Temani Afif.

What new tools shipped?

• This hue shall pass, a new color contrast checker from Clearleft. It checks every combination of colors, distinguishes a plain fail from "Fail: close to passing," and lets you adjust lightness until the ratio meets WCAG AA/AAA. The author plans to adopt it going forward.
• Gradient Layers, built by Ahmad Shadeed, a visual editor for creating and editing gradients from scratch — easier than hand-writing CSS, especially for multi-layer gradients.

What's coming to gradients?

Two new gradient types are on the way, explained by Josh Tumath with sample syntax:

background-image: mesh-gradient(red, blue; green, yellow);
background-image: freeform-gradient(red top left, yellow bottom right);

The mesh-gradient demos, the author writes, are what really show how "awesome" these types are.

Which browser features landed?

• Chrome 155: margin-trim (no Firefox support), symbols() (no Safari support), text-decoration-skip-spaces (no Firefox or Safari support)
• Firefox 158: JPEG XL, now Baseline; CSS typed arithmetic, now Baseline
• Chrome 156: random() (no Firefox support), :navigation-source (no Safari or Firefox support)
• Safari 27.1: a whole batch of CSS features for the iPhone Duo
• Firefox 159: scroll-driven animations, now Baseline

The Baseline designations matter here: they mark features as interoperable across the major browsers, the threshold most teams wait for before shipping.

Whether the newsletter cadence holds, the pipeline of CSS features clearly will — with random(), anchor positioning, and the new gradient types all pointing toward a year where layout and decoration logic moves further into CSS itself.