Best JavaScript libraries for websites (pick what you need)

UI: React / Vue / Svelte
CSS/UI: Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap
Animations: GSAP, Framer Motion
Charts: Chart.js, D3.js
Forms: React Hook Form, Formik
HTTP: Axios
Dates: Day.js
Validation: Zod, Yup
State: Redux Toolkit, Zustand
Build: Vite

Tip: don’t add libraries “just in case”-opt for the smallest stack.

#javascript #webdev #frontend #html #coding

CodePen Blog
Chris’ Corner: Light & Boxes

Andy Bell with pitch perfect bait for me: Fun shadow coding challenge. Just a simple line across a page, but imagine that line is a light source. Squares below the light source have a box-shadow. How can we make it so as the squares scroll by, that box-shadow adjusts itself to honor that “light source”?
https://blog.codepen.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-06-at-7.37.03-AM.png
JavaScript? Of course, the all-powerful JavaScript can do this. That’s what Andy himself did eight years ago with the inception of this idea.

Kitty Giraudel blogged in with a solution involving animation-timeline: scroll(); which I’m quite sure is just the kind of thing Andy was fishing for. But Kitty relied on some information from JavaScript:

In CSS we can’t read offsetTop or offsetHeight, so we pass them from JavaScript as custom properties:

This isn’t illegal, of course.

I think this is one of these things where some JavaScript is not only needed, but also probably quite important to craft a solution that makes fewer assumptions and work nicely in more flexible circumstances — even if still relying on scroll-driven animations.

But certainly it’s fun to flex those muscles a little harder and see if there is a way. Roman Komarov jumped in and used scroll-driven animations as well, but of the animation-timeline: view(); type rather than scroll(). I think this is key as then we’ve unlocked information about the boxes position within the viewport that we wouldn’t have otherwise. I kinda love Roman’s solution as it doesn’t adjust individual box-shadow values at all, those just adjust from a shadow generally “pointed down” to “pointed up” and it interpolates between them. All the logic is tucked into the animation-range declaration.

There is a take where the box-shadow values are manipulated directly with a view() scroll timeline though, from Chris Bolson. Each of the shadows properties are directly manipulated in the keyframe. Like others, this requires the custom properties to be @property delcared with a type so that the animation knows how to animate them. Chris’ approach is extra classy as it has this touch where the further away from the light source, the lighter the shadow, which feels great.

Chris Wachtman jumped in with some alternate takes based on the light source idea. Like what if the light source wasn’t a line, but instead your cursor turned into a little sun!

CSS is so cool. Kitty, Chris(es), Roman, you’re pretty cool too.

📡 System Radar UI

A pure CSS scanning animation.

Perfect for "Server Status" pages or security dashboards. It creates a sense of activity and monitoring without using a single line of JavaScript.

👇 Copy Code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<style>
  body{background:#000;margin:0;height:100vh;display:flex;align-items:center;justify-content:center}
  
  .radar{
    width:200px;height:200px;border:2px solid #0f0;border-radius:50%;
    position:relative;background:radial-gradient(transparent 60%, rgba(0,255,0,0.1) 100%);
    box-shadow:0 0 20px rgba(0,255,0,0.2)
  }
  
  /* Grid Lines */
  .radar::before{content:'';position:absolute;top:50%;left:0;width:100%;height:1px;background:#0f0}
  .radar::after{content:'';position:absolute;left:50%;top:0;height:100%;width:1px;background:#0f0}
  
  /* Scanning Beam */
  .beam{
    width:100%;height:100%;border-radius:50%;
    background:conic-gradient(from 0deg, transparent 0deg, transparent 270deg, rgba(0,255,0,0.5) 360deg);
    animation:spin 2s linear infinite
  }
  
  /* Center Dot */
  .dot{
    width:6px;height:6px;background:#0f0;border-radius:50%;
    position:absolute;top:50%;left:50%;transform:translate(-50%,-50%);
    box-shadow:0 0 10px #0f0
  }
  
  @keyframes spin{100%{transform:rotate(360deg)}}
</style>

<div class="radar">
  <div class="beam"></div>
  <div class="dot"></div>
</div>

#CSS #Animation #Dashboard #UI #Snippet

CodePen Blog
Chris’ Corner: All Together Now

Individual fresh CSS features can be amazing, but I always say it’s the most impressive when they go together. Adam Argyle knocked one out of the park with his modestly named Nice Select post & demo. His own post lists all the CSS features that went into it, but I’ll do a quick overview. https://blog.codepen.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/nice-selects-1024x494.avif * The core of it is these are “Custom Selects” meaning a native element with appearance: base-select applied. That unlocks the ability to essentially style any part of it any way you want. (By the way, multi-selects are very close now too.)
* The opened menu is positioned with anchor positioning and have great edge-detection fallbacks.
* The menus animate both opening and closing thanks to @starting-style and allow-discrete transitions.
* The scrolling menus have slightly customized scrollbar styles and a subtle animation where the fade in from the edges via a view() style scroll-driven animation.
* Logical properties, color schemes, and user preferences are used so users needs are taken into account.
* The headers within the menus are sticky with custom styling when stuck.

And honestly, a whole bunch more. Perhaps on their own, each of these features is like hey, that’s kinda neat, but when you start looking at all these CSS improvements combined, you can see how wildly powerful CSS has become. You might say CSS has become a much more intelligent language.

What do we still want from CSS? It’s getting harder to think of entirely fresh features that don’t have any thought put into them at all yet. For instance, Nathan Knowler’s 2026 CSS Wishlist is all stuff that is either here or coming already, and the wish is how they turn CSS into a more cohesive system. Me, I still really want margin-trim supported everywhere, and my 2023 list still had some stuff I’d take. Oh, and I’d take like ::before-end / ::before-begin / ::after-end / ::after-begin so we’d have both more and more-placeable pseudo elements that mimics insertAdjacentHTML. Or infinite.

Ya know how there used to be lists and roundups and stuff that were like “Stuff you don’t need JavaScript for anymore!!!!!”? I love those, obviously, but I feel like we don’t see them quite as much anymore because HTML and CSS have damn near got it covered now. Like if you absolutely need JavaScript for something, it’s like, yes, that’s JavaScript territory. It’s not for things that we’re only leaning on JavaScript for because of it’s power to measure things or detect visibility or handle events. We’ve gotten the heart of those things in CSS now.

Just a few of those as a taste…

* Una Kravets: Follow-the-leader pattern with CSS anchor positioning. A Table of Contents menu that knows exactly which sections are currently visible and can be styled as such? With no JavaScript at all? Amazing.
* Bramus Van Damme: Solved by CSS Scroll State Queries: hide a header when scrolling down, show it again when scrolling up. With no JavaScript at all? Get outta here.
* Una (again) also explains this in Directional CSS with scroll-state(scrolled). It’s so simple. No JavaScript.

* Ahmad Shadeed: Use Cases for Field Sizing. Form fields like and > that grow in size based on the contents they contain, with whatever constraints you want? With No JavaScript at all? Ship it.

It’s almost like CSS is evolving specifically to do things we once needed JavaScript for.

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CodePen Blog
418: CodeMirror 6

Chris Coyier and Stephen Shaw discuss the transition from CodeMirror 5 to CodeMirror 6, highlighting the significant improvements in accessibility, performance, and user experience. They delve into architectural changes, integration with modern JavaScript frameworks such as Next.js, and the new theming options available in the editor.

Time Jumps
* 00:00:05 Welcome to CodePen Radio in 2026
* 00:01:07 CodeMirror’s journey with CodePen
* 00:07:41 Getting different language support in CodeMirror
* 00:13:26 Improved search and developer experience
* 00:15:30 Support for Emmet
* 00:18:21 Theming CodeMirror
* 00:21:11 Great support from CodeMirror

CodePen Blog
Chris’ Corner: SVG Tools

You can kinda smell a vibe-coded app these days. TypingSVG has that odor, but like… in a good way? An app like this absolutely should exist. Someone needed it, and how instead of it just being some little tool they’ve tucked away for themselves or thrown away, they tossed it up on some inexpensive hosting and now we all have it.

I give it some text and a variety of options and it produces an SVG file with a typing animation on it. Like this: https://blog.codepen.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/cp-svg.svg This animated SVG will work even as an , which might be news to some. They’ll let you hotlink the image (so it works with query params, essentially), but I’ve uploaded it to our own site for longevity.

Why does it look vibe-coded? Involvement of purple. Vercel subdomain. Random dark mode for no particular reason. Very simple componentry with box shadows around everything. I suspect this look will just be a funny blip in time, as I’m already noticing a new fancier aesthetic emerge from Claude Code that uses their Front-end Design Skill that involves kinda classy all-caps headers and footers with more exotic font choices.

OK I guess we’re doing SVG now, so here we go.

I don’t know if Stroke is vibe-coded, but maybe! There is one where you draw (kinda begs for a signature), and then it animates where you just drew (drawed?). https://blog.codepen.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-22-at-8.05.32-AM-1024x500.png I’m not embedding this one as animated because it actually gives you a React component with a pretty hefty dependency (Motion). It’s a neat tool, but I find that a bummer, as I don’t think React or Motion is required for this to work, and it would be a lot more usable with some simple built-in styles or a web component with props to control it. SVG Doodles: “Browse a curated collection of free, customizable SVG doodles and icons to use in your websites, apps, slides, and prints.” https://blog.codepen.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-22-at-8.01.08-AM-1024x593.png You can almost use the straight-up SVG syntax directly in CSS (like as a background-image), which is very satisfying. You do have to URL encode a handful of characters. You aren’t gonna get syntax highlighting though. I’d have a stronger urge for CSS to make this even nicer, but shape() quells my desires since it’s so good at doing its own thing. David Bushell has a nice SVG Optimization and Accessibility Basics guide.

Poor SVG. It’s old technology that hardly ever changes, yet for as much as people find new cool uses for it, people also still find security vulnerabilities with it. This one is about clickjacking, which is basically half social engineering, that is, placing stuff on the page that tricks you into interacting with it.

I’ll leave you with Fotis Papadogeorgopoulos’ @svg-use, which I haven’t tried yet, but it’s a way to lean into SVG’s <useelement. I can say that there are a ton of pro’s and con’s to all the ways to display SVG. I too was enamored with <usefor a while as it seems like it can be so efficient in so many ways. It can be, but the downsides are real, like the lack of stylability and the inability to load from a third-party domain. But this tool is deeply in JavaScript, which I imagine can take a stab at solving both.