Many standards, especially in the last decade, don’t just streamline implementation: They open up whole new creative possibilities! CSS grid and subgrid, high-gamut color, container queries, scroll-driven animations, view transitions, color schemes and more!

Some of these ideas make it into design tools, but the wait can be long… understandably so, making interfaces for this stuff is hard! By the time Figma introduced their flexbox equivalent, the more powerful CSS Grid was already years into baseline availability.

Most HTML elements want to Elasti-Girl their way through any viewport size.

And can we talk about the awesomeness that is dev tools? In any modern browser, developers (or curious nerds of any discipline) can inspect every size, color and property of every single element of the page without any additional effort from the designer. Super-powered design specs, absolutely free.

I wish I were overstating the degree to which this has become an issue. But when I regularly talk to “full-stack developers” who don’t know how to write an unordered list or who don’t know that you can’t nest a button inside of a link, I’m convinced that the term “full-stack” has always been meaningless.