Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

The web platform is evolving faster than many developers realise. New APIs, CSS capabilities, and authentication methods are landing in browsers right now—not distant specifications, but production-ready technologies you can use today. At Web Directions Developer Summit this November, we’re exploring these emerging technologies with the engineers building them.

CSS: From Styling to Storytelling

CSS has evolved far beyond layout and color. Lee Meyer demonstrates this evolution in “Supercharged Scrolling with CSS.” Scroll-timeline, view-timeline, and scroll-state queries unlock rich, interactive storytelling with minimal CSS and no JavaScript.

The progression from JavaScript-dependent scrollytelling to declarative CSS represents more than convenience—it’s about performance, maintainability, and accessibility. Lee will show how modern CSS enables experiences that were impossible or impractical just a few years ago.

Form Controls: Finally Customizable

Tim Nguyen from Apple’s WebKit team tackles one of the web’s oldest frustrations in “Form Control Styling.” Text inputs, checkboxes, radio buttons, and sliders have been part of the web since the beginning, yet styling them remains challenging.

Tim will explain why HTML form controls have been so difficult to customize and introduce upcoming improvements that make them easier to style using only CSS. This isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s about making native controls viable alternatives to custom implementations, with all the accessibility and usability benefits that entails.

Authentication Without Passwords

Eiji Kitamura from Google’s Chrome Developer Relations team surveys the rapidly evolving authentication landscape in “State of Identity and Authentication on the Web.”

Passkeys introduce simple, phishing-resistant authentication. Federated Credential Management (FedCM) provides streamlined, browser-mediated identity federation. Digital Credentials enable trusted identity verification. These aren’t experimental—they’re shipping in browsers now, and Eiji will show you which APIs you should be implementing today.

The implications extend beyond security. These technologies change user experience fundamentally, reducing friction while improving safety. Understanding them now positions you ahead of the authentication curve.

Offline-First APIs

Zach Jensz explores the powerful but underutilized APIs that enable offline-first applications in “Offline AI Web Apps.” Service Worker, Cache, IndexedDB, OPFS (Origin Private File System), and webGPU are shrouded in misconception, but they enable exceptional user experiences.

These technologies aren’t just about handling poor connectivity—they enable fundamentally different architectures. Applications that load instantly, work fully offline, and store data privately without server roundtrips. Combined with in-browser AI via webGPU, they represent a complete rethinking of what web applications can be.

Computer Science Fundamentals

Ryan Yu from Marigold takes us back to fundamentals in “Understanding Recursion for Elegant Solutions.” Recursion often feels complex, but understanding how it works under the hood in JavaScript—including stack overflow prevention—opens up new ways of solving problems.

Ryan will compare iterative and recursive approaches to real-world problems, demonstrating when recursion produces cleaner, more readable code and when it’s the necessary approach. As we work increasingly with AI systems and complex data structures, these fundamentals become more relevant, not less.

The Mathematics of Design

Dmitry Baranovskiy from Adobe explores deeper foundations in “Let No One Ignorant of Geometry Enter.” Geometry has been the silent architect of art, design, and technology since ancient Greece—proportions, perspective, spirals, symmetry.

These mathematical structures still shape how we design and code for the web. Understanding them provides new tools for thinking about visual systems, animation, and interaction. Dmitry, creator of Raphaël and Snap.SVG, brings deep expertise in geometry-heavy web development to show how these ancient principles apply to modern challenges.

Why Emerging Technologies Matter

The gap between early adopters and late majority has never been shorter. Technologies that land in browsers today become expected baseline functionality within months, not years. The teams that adopt passkeys, modern CSS capabilities, and offline-first patterns now gain immediate advantages in user experience, security, and performance.

But there’s a deeper benefit: understanding emerging technologies as they stabilize gives you the context to evaluate what comes next. You develop pattern recognition for which new capabilities will matter and which are merely interesting experiments.

The speakers at Web Directions Developer Summit aren’t speculating about the future—they’re demonstrating technologies you can use today. Tim Nguyen works on WebKit itself. Eiji Kitamura leads identity and authentication for Chrome Developer Relations. These are the engineers building the platform, sharing what they’re building and why.

This is your opportunity to learn about emerging web technologies from the people implementing them in browsers and using them in production.

Register for Web Directions Developer Summit and join us November 19-20 in Sydney (or streaming online) to explore emerging web technologies with the engineers building them.