Getting started with the CSS Custom Highlight API

Text highlighting is a widely used feature across various platforms, enhancing user experience by emphasizing specific elements such as search terms or errors. The CSS Custom Highlight API simplifies the process of adding custom styles to text ranges on websites and applications, although it is still in the Working Draft stage and not yet supported by all browsers, such as Firefox. The API involves creating highlight styles with limited CSS rules, setting the text range using the Range() constructor, and applying the highlight through the Highlight() constructor and CSS.highlights.set method. While this API offers flexibility and improved performance over traditional methods, it faces limitations regarding accessibility and semantic meaning, currently supporting only three types: highlight, spelling-error, and grammar-error. Through various examples, the potential of this API to improve both usability and accessibility is evident, though further development and broader browser support are anticipated.