Lea Verou, PhD

Product, web standards, usability • @csswg Invited Expert • @w3ctag alum • CS/HCI PhD @MIT Also: 🐘 @[email protected] • 🦋 @lea.verou.me

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

Incredibly honored to have been awarded “Pathfinder for Standards” by @openjsf! 💛

Love the blurb too, made me blush! ☺️:
“Lea is a rare person who has strong academic credentials, has helped create rigorous industry standards, but always focuses on the needs of real world users who have little patience with the underlying theory and mind-numbing detail. Furthermore she has spent much of her career in open source communities building products and services that make those theories and standards truly available to the web community.  During Lea's tenure on the W3C TAG, she not only contributed to the day to day work of design reviews and liaison with the JS standards community, but initiated new work to improve and explain the web's Design Principles to web developers.”

Glad to have been able to receive it in person at #jsconf.

[OpenJS Foundation @openjsf]

Introducing 🥁🥁🥁 our JavaScriptLandia award recipients for this year!

Beyond building new features, our recipients guide others, maintain essential systems, document the hard parts, and strengthen the community every step of the way. 💙

Congratulations to all! Read more about our honorees here: https://t.co/koMWMvh1Eq

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

@fly_52088 @claudeai Yes, but it has side effects. Personally I’d never do it to a human, but others do. There’s a popular Kissinger anecdote around this, search for his name + “is this the best you can do?”

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

💡Recent insight: gaslighting @claudeai seems to improve code quality >90% of the time.

“You overengineered this, there is a simpler way”
“There is a smaller delta that buys us most of the benefits”
“There is a more elegant way”
“This is not architecturally coherent”

…before I even read its code. 😆

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

@narrativeCtrl @claudeai …do tell 👀

[一丝 @yisibl]

Implementing `polygon(round)` was a challenging yet incredibly rewarding process. We received tremendous support from the Blink CSS, Paint, Opera and Skia teams.
It’s finally set to debut in Chrome 150!
https://t.co/iLk21IHECa

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

I did not lose my identity to motherhood and I feel it makes me a better mother that my child is not my entire identity.

You lot lose your identities to motherhood because (a) you married men who don’t pull their weight as fathers and (b) you’ve been told you need to do that to be good moms. You don’t.

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

@blackie_just The fallacy here is that you think 15 years later you would be the same. If you have kids young you age faster. That’s why you couldn’t have done them 15 years later.

[PAYWALLMEN.COM @ICONOCLASTIAE]

Men have thousands of years of head start in education as they literally prohibited women from higher education and suppressed or stole their academic achievements.

In less than a century, girls are out performing boys.

Remember that no one ever tried to control someone who isn’t powerful….

[Rev. SisterScáthach of Dún Scáith🤘🏼 @Urtoez75_2]

Like I said;

We don’t have a male loneliness epidemic, we have a male entitlement epidemic.

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

Before we claim that LLMs generate bad frontend code, we should establish the frame of reference. Bad compared to what?

Many of these discussions compare LLMs against some idealized standard of “perfect” frontend code, forgetting the realities of most human-authored code that came before them.

In my experience, LLMs produce *far* better code than the average frontend developer, just not better than the superstar top 1% dev.

[Rushi @rushicrypto]

I don’t think people want pure capitalism or pure socialism.

People just want to afford rent.
Go to the doctor without fear.
Have clean streets, good schools, decent wages, and still have freedom.

The happiest countries on earth figured out that balance matters.
Too much greed destroys people.
Too much control does too.

Most normal people are just asking for a system that actually lets them live.

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

Is it just me or did @claudeai get less competent lately?

Terrible overengineering, poor abstractions, missing the point entirely, and all of that with terrible latency. A shadow of its former self!

It’s starting to remind me of Codex back in Feb (no idea what it's like now).

Nothing new installed, no new config. @DmitrySharabin noticed the same thing. Today, he switched back to Opus 4.6, in hopes.

I’m holding back to see how his experiment goes before switching myself, but it’s driving me insane.

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

@AlStr20314 @omgsidewalks Pattern recognition is not actually part of adhd. It’s just that adhd is comorbid with autism in about 20-30% of cases.

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

@philwalton to discuss it in more detail in 30 mins!

https://t.co/qojZyYtwUq

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

Thrilled this is now out, keeping quiet has been SO HARD! 🤐

I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to this project as a domain expert consultant over the past few months, and have seen firsthand the level of thoughtfulness and genuine care for developers and the web platform that has gone into it. ❤️

It’s still very early days, but I’m really proud to have played a small part, and excited for what's next. Looking forward to seeing what folks build with it!

[Chrome for Developers @ChromiumDev]

Ensure your coding agents build apps that are modern, fast, & secure by default → https://t.co/TAdQTHdXRc

We just announced Modern Web Guidance at #GoogleIO. By injecting AI-ready skills and modern features—complete with Baseline Widely Available fallbacks—it ensures your agent keeps up with the latest web features🧵

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

The current state of AccentColor/AccentColorText:
4 browsers, 4 different color pairs

From left to right: Chrome 148 (stable), Chrome 150 (canary), Safari, Firefox.

- No browser uses the accent-color property for it (Sep 2025 spec change)
- Chrome: had removed support, re-adding w/ with a hardcoded blue and automatic AccentColorText
- Safari: hardcoded blue, always black text (?) If so, yikes.
- Firefox: actual OS accent color, automatic AccentColorText

Why would all browsers not use the real OS accent color? Fingerprinting concerns.

Up to you whether this is a reasonable tradeoff. 🤷🏽‍♀️

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

@thriving__kids Did thy control for socioeconomic factors? Carbs are much cheaper so I wonder if this is indirectly measuring parental income level.

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

@putFM Any specific features you remember?

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

🚨 What are some modern web platform (CSS, HTML, JS) features that you wish your AI agent utilized, but doesn't (or gets them wrong)?

I’ll go first:
- CSS: lh unit, trig functions, nesting
- HTML: inert attribute
- JS: Object.groupBy(), Regex lookbehind, regex named groups, RegExp.escape()

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

They have Medicaid, but that’s only one factor. They don’t have a pension, higher education, childcare, assisted living when old and a ton of other things. Low savings is actually not that big of a factor — Europeans don’t need to save as aggressively exactly because of these guarantees.

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

I was thinking about this yesterday. If you take into account the additional % of their earnings Americans need to spend on savings, healthcare, childcare, university tuition, etc, it far outweighs the taxes of even the most “socialist” of European countries.

Or it does at least up to upper middle class or so. Perhaps it doesn’t for the ultra-rich, which would be yet another case where the needs of the 1% are keeping the other 99% down…

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

You can’t really argue this. They believe in investing in the people and infrastructure.

[Lea Verou, PhD @LeaVerou]

What are you on? Smeeding’s own work using LIS data typically finds the opposite, that the US has the weakest safety net among rich countries and its bottom decile lags Nordic counterparts in absolute PPP terms. His 2016 Pathways report explicitly notes the US poor “have little in the way of personal savings to cushion drops in income.”

Here you go:

Smeeding (2016), Pathways SOTU Report https://t.co/3QMhsfrJca

Garfinkel, Rainwater & Smeeding (2010), Wealth and Welfare States (Oxford UP) https://t.co/tt9DCEAzqQ

LIS measures cash disposable income, which is exactly what the original argument was about. It captures earnings net of taxes and cash transfers. It does not subtract required private spending on healthcare premiums, deductibles, childcare, tuition, etc; nor does it add in-kind benefits like tax-funded healthcare, university, childcare, parental leave, etc.

Citing LIS to rebut “Americans spend more out-of-pocket on things Europeans get through taxes” misses the point.

Studies that do adjust for non-cash benefits and required private spending tend to narrow or reverse the apparent US advantage in the middle of the distribution.

“Living standards” ≠ disposable income. Americans have shorter life expectancy, higher infant mortality, and face medical-bankruptcy risk that doesn’t exist in Europe. The functional-outcomes literature (e.g. recent work comparing US to 11 European countries) finds the bottom US income group has roughly 2–7× the rate of daily-living limitations at older working ages.

If your metric is “money in the bank account on payday,” you can construct a US-favorable story; if it’s “actual living standards,” you can’t.