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A monthly letter about HTML and CSSNext issue · Monday, September 14

Cleared to use. Cleared to delete.

The web platform grows. Your codebase doesn’t have to.

Every month I check what changed in HTML and CSS, browser by browser: which new arrivals are cleared to use, and which fallbacks you can finally clear out. I keep the few that actually matter, and give each one a verdict: Cleared, Hold, or Skip. I publish the result in one email you can read in five minutes.

Or just read this month’s issue below

The difference

Baseline tells you a feature shipped. It doesn’t tell you whether to bother.

webstatus.dev (opens in a new tab) will tell you that mask-image passed 30 months of browser support in June. It won’t tell you that Safari still fails every SVG variant of the mask-repeat tests, while passing the raster ones. And when a mask fails, it doesn’t degrade politely: it hides the wrong thing! So masks are a Hold this month. Google’s team can’t tell you to hold on a feature Google just shipped. But I can…

  • Cleared

    Use it now. Once it is safe everywhere, the fallback goes.

  • Hold

    Real, but not yet, and here is the specific reason.

  • Skip

    Works fine. Not worth your afternoon.

How a verdict gets made

Issue 07

Cleared 07 · July 2026 · Cleared to use. Cleared to delete. Five minutes.

AVIF cleared: one fallback can go

Published August 3, 2026 · covers July 2026 · 1 Cleared

July was thin. One feature arrived in the whole month, a JavaScript locale API outside the CSS and HTML this publication covers, and three crossed 30 months, all that a quiet January 2024 had set in motion. Two of the three ask nothing of you. The third is AVIF, and it retires one of your image fallbacks.

01Cleared

AVIF

Safe everywhere as of July 25, 2026

The AV1 image format. Chrome has decoded it since 2020; Edge completed the core set on January 25, 2024, and the 30-month clock ran out on July 25. If your images ship as a three-format stack, AVIF on top, WebP in the middle, JPEG at the floor, the middle is now dead weight.

Delete: the WebP sources in your <picture> elements, and the encode step that produces them.

HTML · before after
<source srcset="chart.avif" type="image/avif">
<source srcset="chart.webp" type="image/webp">
<img src="chart.jpg" alt="Monthly revenue">

<source srcset="chart.avif" type="image/avif">
<img src="chart.jpg" alt="Monthly revenue">

A browser takes the first source whose type it supports, and every browser in the core set now takes the AVIF. The browsers still outside the set never reached the WebP for its format; they needed a floor they could render, and that is the JPEG’s job. What the WebP bought them was bytes: without it they download the same picture, heavier. That is the whole cost of the deletion, and it falls on a shrinking audience.

The floor stays. AVIF sits at about 93% of global traffic on caniuse’s counters, so a bare .avif in src with no fallback is a broken image for about one visitor in fifteen: desktop Safari before 16.4, iOS before 16.1, and every browser too old to have met the format. A missing image does not degrade, it is simply absent. Delete the middle of the stack, never the bottom.

Most sites never built this stack. In the HTTP Archive’s 2024 almanac, about one image in eight was a WebP and about one in a hundred an AVIF, and a <picture> that switches on format appeared on a few pages in a hundred. Search your templates for type="image/webp": if nothing comes back, or the floor under your sources is itself a .webp, there is no middle to delete and nothing to do this month.

One number needed a look before this verdict could ship. webstatus.dev scores stable Firefox at 0 on AVIF’s tests. The suite behind that number is two rendering tests, and ordinary still-image decoding is in neither: one advances an animated AVIF to its second frame, the other renders a file carrying a progressive-rendering flag. Firefox currently fails both. For a static image stack, the deletion above, they say nothing. If you ship animated or progressively encoded AVIF, test those files in Firefox before leaning on them.

Deleted something thanks to this? Got a correction? .

Issue 07 permalinkArchive

What’s next

I already know what November brings

A feature becomes widely available exactly 30 months after the last browser ships it. No committee, no vote, just a date. So I can already tell you that five features cross that line in November 2026, and what each of the twelve months ahead holds. What I can’t tell you yet is which of them are worth acting on, and that’s what the newsletter is for.

See the twelve-month calendar

Who writes this

One person, one opinion

I’m Yann. I run minimal design (opens in a new tab), and I’ve been building for the web for over twenty years. I also maintain mCSS (opens in a new tab), an open-source CSS framework. I started Cleared to break a loop I kept repeating: spot something clever on CodePen, look it up on caniuse, shelve it for another year. I like new toys as much as anyone, but what I need to know is which ones are ready for client work.

More about Cleared and why it exists

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