demo · v138

Anchor pagination

A horizontal scroll gallery driven by plain <a href="#x"> tags. scroll-target-group: auto on the link container promotes every anchor to a scroll marker. The browser tracks which target is current and the matching link gets :target-current automatically — no IntersectionObserver, no scroll listener, no JS.

Unflagged in Chrome 138. scroll-target-group: auto on a container makes its descendant <a> elements behave like ::scroll-marker pseudos — including the auto-tracked :target-current selector — without giving up real anchor semantics (focus, keyboard, accessible name).

probing scroll-target-group…

current target: —

:target-current selector: auto-tracked by engine

JS listeners: 0

Overview

Chrome 138 ships the first batch of built-in AI APIs, a deeper speculation pipeline, and a handful of CSS-engine missing primitives.

Speculation

Mobile moderate eagerness now fires on pointerdown/touchstart. Sec-Purpose header is sent. Service workers can intercept speculative prefetches.

Clear-Site-Data

Two new tokens — prefetchCache and prerenderCache — make logout responses surgical instead of blunt.

Cache sharing

An allowlist of pervasive resources can share cache across origins — fewer redundant downloads with strong correctness guarantees.

AI APIs

Summarizer, Translator, Language Detector — all on-device, all out of origin trial.

HTML in canvas

Layer rasterised DOM into a 2D canvas, with text and accessible names preserved.

Removals

Async range removal from MSE deprecated; GPUAdapter.isFallbackAdapter removed.

The CSS

nav.pager {
  scroll-target-group: auto;            /* every <a href="#x"> descendant becomes a scroll marker */
}
nav.pager a:target-current {            /* engine sets this on the marker pointing at the
                                           current-most snap point of the scroller */
  background: black;
  color: white;
}

What's happening

Without scroll-target-group, anchors are just anchors — clicking scrolls to the target, but the browser doesn't track which target is "current" as the user scrolls.
With scroll-target-group: auto, the container forms a scroll marker group. Each descendant anchor is paired with its target, and exactly one anchor matches :target-current at any moment.
The pairing rule is the same as ::scroll-marker: the marker for whichever target is most visible in the nearest scroller.
Unlike ::scroll-marker, real <a> elements keep their accessible name, focusability, and keyboard semantics. AT users can tab through them and they hear "Overview, link" — not a CSS pseudo.
This was the missing primitive for any pattern where you need both navigation and visible "you are here" state — pagination, breadcrumbs, vertical ToC.