Deep Linking

Accessibility (often abbreviated a11y) is the practice of designing and building websites and apps so they can be used by everyone, including people with visual, motor, auditory, or cognitive disabilities. This involves proper semantic markup, keyboard navigation support, sufficient color contrast, and screen reader compatibility. Beyond being an ethical responsibility, accessibility is increasingly a legal requirement in many jurisdictions.

Semantic HTML means using HTML elements that clearly describe their meaning and purpose, such as `<article>`, `<nav>`, `<header>`, and `<section>`, instead of generic `<div>` tags. This practice improves accessibility for screen readers, boosts SEO by helping search engines understand page structure, and makes code far more readable for other developers. It's considered a foundational best practice in modern web development.

Container Queries allow CSS styles to respond to the size of a parent container rather than the browser viewport, solving a long-standing limitation of media queries. By marking an element as a containment context with `container-type`, its children can use `@container` rules to adapt their layout based on the container's dimensions. This makes truly reusable components possible — a card component can rearrange itself whether it's in a sidebar or a full-width section.

CSS-in-JS is an approach where styles are written directly in JavaScript files, often co-located with the components they style. Libraries like Styled Components, Emotion, and Stitches generate unique class names at build time or runtime, eliminating style conflicts. While it enables dynamic styling based on props and full encapsulation, the trend has shifted toward zero-runtime solutions and utility-first CSS due to performance concerns.

React Navigation is the most widely used routing and navigation library for React Native applications. It provides stack, tab, and drawer navigators that mimic native navigation patterns on both iOS and Android, with smooth transitions and gesture support. Its JavaScript-based approach means navigation logic is fully customizable, and it integrates with deep linking, authentication flows, and state persistence out of the box.

The View Transitions API is a browser-native way to create animated transitions between different DOM states or page navigations, previously only possible with complex JavaScript animation libraries. It captures a snapshot of the current state, applies the DOM update, then animates between the old and new snapshots using CSS. This API works for both single-page app state changes and multi-page navigations, enabling smooth page transitions with minimal code that feels native to the platform.