HTML Can Do That: No JavaScript Needed
HTML now handles dynamic features once reserved for JavaScript, from dialogs and popovers to grouped accordions and native input pickers. This page showcases modern HTML capabilities with browser support details and code examples, highlighting how declarative attributes replace scripting for common UI patterns.
HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript’s remit.
- dematz
This comment by yurishimo should not be [dead], imo
>Just a heads up but datalist is not really a great solution if you need a strong contract. The user can still type whatever they want into the field and there is no fuzzy filtering or typo mitigation. Once you add those requirements, a library that gives you a more fully featured combobox is likely going to make a lot of sense in your project.
It is true! HTML can do a lot of cool stuff, it might get you 100% of the way depending on what you're doing. But if you have a lot of forms where users pick from a value set, and want to enforce no other strings and get a good search experience, datalist does not get you there.
- jamescun
I'm that minutia in your statistics that is still rocking NoScript in 2026, enabling JavaScript on a site-by-site basis, but this is increasingly difficult with the modern web.
Hopefully these and others modern HTML features gain adoption, along with realizing perhaps a Single Page Application isn't necessary in most instances.
I don't often have to write frontend code, but when I do, there is very little in terms of interactivity you cannot do with HTML these days, worst case a little sprinkle of something like HTMX.
- hollowturtle
An "HTML Can't Do That" would be hundreds pages long, and at the pace of getting features like dialogs every decade we're limiting ourselfs on any further development and creating serious apps. It wasn't created for apps, it was created for light document formatting. When we will pretend a drawing api we can call directly from webassembly? Outside of web ui frameworks are doing just fine and way better and more performantly than html and dom
- hk__2
Related to this, I’d love that HTML natively support sortable tables. This is a common need but every single time I have to reimplement it.
- silvestrov
I'd really wish I could force ISO format for the date input as the current "platform native" is confusing for some users when the OS use a different language than the web page that is shown.
For some multi-country companies it makes sense to have all admin pages in English no matter the underlying OS language. Imagine sending a screenshot where the OS date format is different from what everybody else expects from an English page.