The stories that have run.

The new piece of HTML is called <model>. The WebKit team, which builds Safari, describes it as “a lot like video, audio, and img — this time embedding a 3D model in the page.” It first appeared a year ago on Apple’s Vision Pro headset, and Safari 27 brings it to the iPhone, the iPad and the Mac.

Until now, an object a visitor could turn on a web page usually meant a separate program running inside a blank rectangle on the page, drawing the object again many times a second. With <model>, the browser draws it itself, the way it already shows a photograph or plays a video. A designer places it in the layout like an image and gives it a width and a height.

The look of the object is in the designer’s hands. A site can supply an environment map: a picture of surroundings whose light falls on the object, so the same leather boot can be lit like a bright shop window or a dim studio. On screens that show extra-bright highlights, the site can also decide how bright the object’s highlights are allowed to go. A setting called stagemode decides how the visitor handles it; set to orbit, it lets them spin the object round and look at it from every side.

An object can be offered in two file formats at once: USDZ, the format Apple uses for 3D, and glTF, an open format kept by the Khronos Group, a standards body for graphics. The browser picks the first one it can show, the same way a page can offer a video in more than one format.

Chrome and Firefox do not support the element yet. The draft standard for it, written in the W3C’s Immersive Web group, shows how a site places an ordinary picture inside the element for browsers that cannot show the object. Those visitors see the photograph; Safari visitors get the object itself.

JPEG XL is a picture format made for photographs. Chrome’s engineers say it makes files 30 to 50 percent smaller than an ordinary JPEG, can save a picture with no loss of quality at all, and can carry HDR images: photographs with brighter highlights and deeper shadows than an ordinary picture, shown at full strength on screens built to display them.

Google tried the format in Chrome once before, hidden behind a setting most people never saw, and removed it at the end of 2022. Apple added it to Safari the following year. Chrome’s team now says it has brought the format back because web developers kept asking for it, year after year.

The change a visitor will notice is how a large photograph arrives. A JPEG XL picture can appear whole almost at once, soft at first, and then sharpen as the rest of the file comes in, instead of leaving an empty frame or filling in from the top down. For a full-screen photograph at the top of a page, the first impression is the picture itself, not a gap waiting for it.

Photographs already saved as JPEGs can be repacked as JPEG XL with nothing lost. Apple’s WebKit team, which builds Safari, puts the saving at about a fifth of the file size on average. An archive of images gets lighter without a single pixel changing.

Chrome’s engineers suggest trying it alongside AVIF, the other modern picture format, and expect JPEG XL to be “most helpful for high-fidelity or lossless compression, especially of photographic images.” Firefox can show the format only in its Nightly test version for now, so a site offers the JPEG XL picture with an ordinary JPEG behind it, and each browser takes the one it can show. Nobody sees a broken image.

Almost every website with a form has one: the box you click to pick a country, a size or a delivery date, which drops open into a list. For thirty years it has been the part of the page a designer could not fully control. The browser drew it with the computer’s or phone’s own menu, so a site set in its own typefaces and colors would open onto a list in the system’s type and the system’s colors.

Safari 27, on iPhone, iPad and Mac, lets designers restyle the whole thing: the box, the list that drops open, the small arrow, and the tick beside the chosen item. Each choice in the list can now hold more than a line of text, for example a color swatch or a second line of detail, and the box can show something different once a choice has been made.

Chrome and Edge have allowed this since early 2025. Firefox has the feature built but switched off unless a user turns it on. A browser that does not support it simply shows the ordinary menu, so nothing breaks for anyone.

Apple also changed what the menu looks like before a designer touches it. Switched to the new mode, it arrives with a soft drop shadow, corners rounded by four pixels, rows tall enough for a fingertip, and a ready-made arrow and tick, in light and dark versions. The WebKit team, which builds Safari, wrote that it wanted something better “after 30 years of web developers struggling with form control styling,” and has taken the new design to the CSS Working Group, the body that writes the rules browsers follow, so that every browser can start from the same look.

It is still the real menu underneath. Keyboards, screen readers and the sending of the form all work as they always have, with no extra code. The menus sit on checkout, sign-up and booking pages, and those pages can now carry the same type, color and detail as the rest of the site.

A designed footer was on 5.4% of the older 592 winners. Among the newest 120 it is on 13 of them, 10.8%. That is 2.1 times as common, the largest rise in the record.

Shed, scored 7.64 in February, is one of the 13. It is a studio of brand designers and interior architects, and the page ends with a worked footer rather than a row of small grey links.

The rest of the rising column is quieter and steadier: the whole site on one page is up half again, images altered live is up a third, and pages that walk you through something in order are up a third on 34 sites, which is the broadest base of any movement here.

The falling column reads more dramatically and says less. Video is down from 9.5% to 2.5%, a drop of nearly three quarters. It is also three websites. Horizontal layouts are two, graphic design four, galleries six. At those counts one more entry moves the figure by a fifth, and a headline built on any of them would be a headline about a handful of sites.

A footer costs nothing to do properly. It is the one part of a page that every visitor who finishes reading arrives at, and on award-winning work it is now twice as likely to have been designed as it was a year ago.

Of the 295 older winners whose look has been read, 64 were laid out like a magazine. Of the newest 98, 15 are. That is 22% down to 15%, the largest movement of any visual family in the record.

Depo Luxe, scored 7.62 in May, is what the family looks like when it is done well: sparse serif type, Roman numerals down the side, photographs cropped and cascading diagonally across a dark gradient. It borrows from high-fashion print and from film stills, and it is unmistakably a web page rather than a scanned spread.

No other family absorbed the share. Cinematic realism held at 17%, Swiss modernism at 14%, work built in 3D at 12%. Every one of those sat within half a point of where it was.

The families that gained are small enough that the gain is hard to trust. Seven of the newest winners read as Y2K and glitch, four as product minimalism. At that size a single site moves the figure by a point.

Period revival fell alongside the magazine look, 8% to 5%, on five sites. Five is too few to call a direction.

The magazine look remains the most common single family in the record. It is also the one moving fastest, and a brief written around it today is being written around the thing that is receding.

Read a dozen winning home pages one after another and the sameness is hard to miss. Real human insights. Canada’s heritage of graphic design. Supercharged productivity. The history of jailhouse lawyers. Five words at the middle of the range, no verb doing any work, and nothing in them addressed to the person reading. They are labels, set enormous.

This is the opposite of what everyone is told. Write to somebody. Say you. Make a promise. It is the first instruction in every guide to writing for the web, and four in five of these headlines contain no you, no your, no we and no our at all. Where a pronoun does appear, the split is nearly even — 13% speak to the reader, 11% speak about the company — which is not the gap the advice implies.

There is one place the pattern breaks, and it is the place you would least expect restraint. On a studio’s own site, we shows up on 22% of headlines against 6% of the client work those same studios produce. Given a brief with nobody to approve it, designers write about themselves. It is the only clean division in the whole comparison.

The buttons tell the same story from underneath. Across the winners that serve their words plainly, 1,125 different labels appear on things built to look like a button, and the most common of them turns up on about one site in fourteen. There is no shared vocabulary for a button at all — no equivalent of the red octagon. And the words that get the most emphasis on a winning site are mostly places to go rather than things to do: contact, about, subscribe.

Why would a field this careful abandon the reader? Because on a page like Into the Storm, the picture is doing the promising. A headline set at that size stops being copy and becomes part of the composition — it has to survive being read at a glance and from across a room, and a sentence with a clause in it will not. The words go short because the design took the job.

That is a real trade, and it is worth knowing you are making it. A label works when there is a photograph behind it strong enough to carry the argument. When there is not, a page that names itself and asks nothing has spent its best position on saying very little.