Anchors Aweigh! (2026.02.28 @ State of the Browser)

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Table of Contents

• The Talk
• Slides
• Recording/Video
• Thanks!

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# The Talk

This talk was a brand new talk (which I had rehearsed at PHPAntwerp just 2 days before) about CSS Anchor Positioning. It’s a high-energy, fast-paced talk that packs a lot of information in ±30 minutes.

We’ve all been there. You need a popover to attach to a button, but they aren’t parent/child. You end up reaching for JavaScript, calculating coordinates, and wrestling with viewport edges. CSS Anchor Positioning is a recent API designed to solve exactly this. This talk is a practical, down-to-earth look at how it works. We’ll explore the anchor() function, the position-anchor and position-area properties, and @position-try to build UIs that are truly context-aware and robust, all without the JS hacks.

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# Slides

The slides of my talk are up on slidr.io are embedded below:

Unfortunately these exported slides don’t contain any of the slide transitions that supported the story I was bringing. Also missing are any recordings of the included demos (they’re just screenshots in the export), but you can click the links to check them out yourself.

All the Anchoring demos that I built are gathered in this CodePen Collection.

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# Recording/Video

The talk was recorded and this post will be updated when the video gets released. Check back later!

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# Thanks!

Thanks to Web Standards London for organizing State of the Browser, with a special shout-out to Dave (MORE ACID!). Similar to previous years, they’ve managed to curate a nice line-up of talks, with the right balance between practical/inspirational, known/new speakers, etc – It was an honor to get to open the conference with this technical deep dive.

It was wonderful catching up with familiar faces (Jake! Cassie! Jeremy! Zach! Keith! Luke! Ryan! Josh! PPK! Niels! Alex! Estelle! Sophie! Sara! Manuel! …) and finally meeting those of you I’ve only known online until now (Oliver! Pavel! James! Josh! …)!

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