MeritWEB

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MeritWEB named 47 subjects and indexed its own scope

A printed index sheet on a desk under a lamp
MeritWEB named 47 subjects and indexed its own scope, in one place.

A working index of what the guide covers, rendered as a single object

MeritWEB's subject is the specific: a named typeface with a designer and a release date, a browser feature with a version number and a ship date, a product interface or a page that set a convention others followed. This index collects everything published so far into one place and holds the shape of the guide's scope.

Type specimen showing the Inter typeface with sample letters, numerals, and the Apple Inc wordmark
The type entries carry the most weight because type is where most of it gets decided.Photo: Inter Specimen · Wikimedia Commons

The type coverage runs from the drawing-room decisions — Inter's single-storey lowercase g, drawn by Rasmus Andersson and released free, set against Söhne, Kris Sowersby's reinterpretation of Akzidenz-Grotesk at the Klim Type Foundry — to the delivery infrastructure. Variable fonts, formalised when OpenType 1.8 landed in 2016, collapsed one file-per-weight workflows. Hinting, subpixel rendering and the x-height decisions that distinguish a face drawn for a screen from one adapted to one are their own subject; so is who pays for a typeface, because the funding model shapes what gets drawn.

The browser-feature strand is dated and sourced throughout. CSS Grid shipped in Chrome 57 and Firefox 52 in March 2017, the first layout system designed for two-dimensional work. Container queries reached every major engine in 2023. :has() — the parent selector the field had asked for for two decades — crossed the same line in December 2023, removing a category of JavaScript. prefers-color-scheme, which made dark-mode preference readable to CSS, landed in 2019 and produced a genre that repays treating as a palette problem rather than a colour inversion.

The field's public argument — in A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, and the archives they left — rounds the coverage out.

Tools have their own thread: Figma, where Adobe's attempted acquisition was announced in September 2022 and abandoned in December 2023; Webflow and Framer, which emit the site rather than a picture of it; design tokens, which turn taste into named values a build step can enforce. The utility-class debate — whether styles belong in a stylesheet or beside the markup — is here too, traced to its arguments rather than its camps.

  1. 2016OpenType 1.8, variable font format
  2. 2017CSS Grid, Chrome 57 / Firefox 52
  3. 2019prefers-color-scheme
  4. 2022Adobe announces Figma acquisition
  5. 2023Container queries and :has() reach all major engines; Adobe abandons acquisition
Three designers around one large monitor in a working studio, mid-discussion, one standing and gesturing at the screen. The screen shows a real interface being picked apart. Faces
A roster is only useful if somebody argues with it.

The pages-as-objects strand covers Stripe's marketing site, which made careful typography and well-set tables into a house style; Linear's dark, dense product page, which became a genre; scroll-driven animation, which was mainstream in JavaScript years before CSS could do it natively; and bento grids, which CSS Grid made cheap enough to become a visual convention. The field's public argument — in A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, and the archives they left — rounds the coverage out.

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