{
  "id": 10630575,
  "title": "Fresh CSS constructs move web design beyond ticky-tacky little boxes",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/29/fresh-css-constructs-move-web-design-beyond-ticky-tacky-little-boxes-10630575",
  "topic": "science",
  "section": "Science",
  "published": "2026-09-29T06:32:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Register Science",
    "slug": "the-register-science",
    "url": "https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/09/29/fresh-css-constructs-move-web-design-beyond-ticky-tacky-little-boxes/5299614"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The tyranny of box design on the World Wide Web is finally ending. A new set of CSS features, including the shape() function and border-shape and corner-shape properties, offers designers a broader palette for fluid content layouts. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first standard for web page layout in 1996, when web sites emulated grid-defined layouts of academic papers, newspapers, and magazines. With more powerful GPUs, web developers now have reasons to break away from square web pages.\n\nIn Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 proto-Sci-Fi classic Flatland, a protagonist experiences the three-dimensional world, much how developers may feel when they first use these new CSS constructs. HTML and CSS could only draw horizontal or vertical lines or borders on a Web page, requiring proprietary plug-ins for fancier layouts. SVG first broke the boxiness of the web, using numerical coordinates to describe shapes, but limited to a canvas placed on a Web page.\n\nThe first attempt at bridging CSS and SVG was the path() function, which had limitations like being non-responsive to changing web page sizes and not understanding variables or CSS units of measurement. The shape() function introduced richer design, built on responsive CSS syntax and combined with clip-path property. Developers can now create ticket stubs, chat bubbles, and other page elements with shape(). The border-shape property completes the work by applying CSS-native coordinates defined in shape() to the web page borders themselves, allowing for easier border design.\n\nDesign possibilities are now expanding, with the ability to carve up a Web page any way desired, put borders within borders, and animate borders with shapes changing when hovered over or filled with images. The shape() function is now supported by all major browsers, while border-shape and corner-shape are still being implemented and considered experimental. The future of fluid web design is in the hands of developers ready to build it.",
  "summary": "Let us bury the web's 30-year layout reliance on rectangles",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 2,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "The Register",
        "title": "Fresh CSS constructs move web design beyond ticky-tacky little boxes",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/29/fresh-css-constructs-move-web-design-beyond-ticky-tacky-little-boxes",
        "published": "2026-09-29T06:32:00.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}