As October draws to a close, we wanted to share the articles and developments that have captured our attention this month. The web continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and helping our members stay informed creates better experiences for our users. As always, we are curious to hear what you’ve been reading and thinking about.
Here are some topics and articles we found interesting this month.
CSS
The CSS landscape continues to mature with significant updates that are changing how we approach styling. Container queries, introduced in CSS 2023 and widely adopted in 2025, allow styles to be based on a container’s size instead of the viewport. This represents a fundamental shift in how we think about responsive design—no longer are we limited to viewport-based media queries.
Modern color handling in CSS includes relative color syntax, which lets you adjust properties like lightness or saturation from an existing color, and the light-dark() function allows easy switching between light and dark color values. For those working with scrollable interfaces, scrollbar-gutter keeps layouts stable by reserving space for a scrollbar, preventing annoying shifts when the scrollbar appears, while scrollbar-color lets you style the scrollbar’s track and thumb.
We found this article on CSS updates for 2025 particularly useful for understanding what’s ready to use right now across all major browsers. The W3C has also published their CSS Snapshot 2025, which provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of CSS specifications.
Accessibility
Accessibility remains a critical focus area for web professionals. On the standards front, there have been updates to the working draft for WCAG 3.0 including removal of exploratory content and updated assertions section of the Explainer for WCAG 3.0.
The European Accessibility Act continues to shape global standards, and organizations worldwide are working to meet upcoming compliance requirements. It’s worth reviewing your current accessibility practices now rather than waiting for deadlines.
AI and Web Development
OpenAI launched GPT-5, a multimodal model that handles text, images, audio, and video with a huge context window of a million tokens. This represents a significant leap in what’s possible with AI-powered development tools.
AI-powered development tools like GitHub Copilot are transforming coding workflows, automating repetitive tasks while enabling developers to focus on creative problem-solving. This comprehensive guide to AI tools for web development explores how these technologies are streamlining everything from code generation to testing and debugging.
The integration of AI with web development is no longer experimental; it’s becoming standard practice. The challenge now is learning to use these tools effectively while maintaining code quality and user experience, especially when it comes to accessibility and security considerations.
WordPress
WordPress development continues to move forward despite earlier concerns about release cadence. October brought three significant Gutenberg releases—21.6, 21.7, and 21.8—each introducing features that streamline development workflows and expand what’s possible in WordPress.
The Command Palette is extending beyond the Site Editor, making navigation commands available throughout the admin. For developers working with taxonomies, the new experimental Terms Query block provides a dedicated tool for building taxonomy-based layouts, particularly useful for directory sites and content hubs.
WordPress 6.9 is confirmed for release on December 2, 2025, bringing simplified site editing, advanced template control, and foundational AI support. If you haven’t updated to WordPress 6.8.3, now would be a good time—it includes important security fixes.
JavaScript Frameworks
The JavaScript ecosystem continues its evolution with several frameworks making significant updates. React 19’s compiler is a move inspired by frameworks like Svelte and Solid—React now compiles code ahead of time, bypassing reliance on the virtual DOM, which means the compiler can eliminate the need for optimization hooks like useMemo and useCallback.
Angular 18 now officially supports zoneless change detection by introducing signals, making Angular apps easier to read, debug, and ship while slashing bundle sizes. Vue.js is working on Vue Vapor Mode, a new compilation strategy that eliminates the virtual DOM, opting instead for hyper-efficient, fine-grained DOM updates.
The Tiobe index for October 2025 shows Python still leading by a wide margin at 24.45%, while C jumped back to 9.29% with the help of its C23 update, and JavaScript remains one of the most widely used languages in web development.
Web Design Trends
Web design in 2025 is embracing personality and expressiveness. Micro animations help guide users, reinforce actions, and give interfaces extra polish through hover effects, button ripples, and loading indicators. Custom cursors are gaining popularity as brand elements.
Web designers are increasingly drawing inspiration from gaming UI aesthetics, integrating 3D, intricate UI details and detailed microinteractions to create an atmosphere of high-tech immersion. At the same time, there’s a countertrend toward organic, handcrafted elements that bring warmth and authenticity to digital spaces.
Dark mode has moved beyond being just a trend—it’s now an expected feature. Many sites are implementing sophisticated light/dark toggles that respect user preferences and system settings. For those interested in implementation details, this tutorial on building a light/dark toggle with the Interactivity API provides a modern approach.
Progressive Web Apps
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) continue to narrow the gap between web and native experiences, with major brands reporting significant performance improvements and user engagement. The PWA market is projected to exceed $15 billion by 2025, driven by surging adoption across sectors.
The most significant advancement is enhanced offline functionality through sophisticated synchronization, allowing users to continue working seamlessly regardless of network conditions. With iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma, Apple has significantly improved PWA support, bringing push notifications, install prompts, and offline functionality that opens up new possibilities for iPhone users.
This technology is particularly valuable for content-heavy applications and e-commerce platforms where uninterrupted user experience directly impacts business outcomes.
New Member Tools
For our members, we have recently added some tools to our Member tools page (tools created by members for use by our members). As with all our tools, we do not collect nor store the information you submit via our forms. Yes, you can often find the same functionality elsewhere on the internet, but do you really know what happens with the data you submit? These new tools include:
- The ability to strip EXIF data from images (this may be helpful when working with client materials).
- The ability to split long strings of text into smaller strings. For example, if you use DKIM with 2,048 bit encryption, you will be working with a long string of text. Of course, when you try to enter this into a DNS record on most servers, you will discover that only the first 255 characters are pasted. You can add subsequent TXT records and this tool allows you to paste those as strings of 250 characters each. As most webmasters working with DNS records know, it is up to the server to stitch those records together into a coherent string after the TXT record has been updated.
Looking Ahead
As we approach the end of 2025, several trends are clear: accessibility is no longer optional, AI tools are becoming integrated into standard development workflows, and the gap between web and native experiences continues to shrink. The frameworks and tools we use continue to mature, offering more powerful capabilities while often becoming simpler to use.
What articles or developments caught your attention this month? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. As always, feel free to reach out to us anytime to learn more about Web Professionals Global and our mission of Community, Education, Certification.
