Intent to Ship: side-relative syntax for background-position-x/y longhands

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Chromestatus

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Oct 29, 2025, 10:44:41 AM (7 days ago) Oct 29
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Specification
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-backgrounds-4/#background-position-longhands

Summary
Defines the background image's position relative to one of its edges. This syntax gives web authors a more flexible and responsive mechanisms to define the background image position, instead of using fixed values that need to be adapted to the window's or frame's size. This feature is applied also to the "-webkit-mask-position" to ensure webcompat levels are the same.

Blink component
Blink>CSS

Web Feature ID
background-position

Motivation
One important motivation is interoperability, given that Chrome is the only browser that lacks this syntax for the background-position-x/y longhands. Additionally, the background-position shorthand, which sets both the x/y positions, already supports the side-relative syntax, so the lack of the same syntax in the longhands may confuse web developers. There is no specific explainer, but this MDN page should be enough to understand the feature: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/background-position-x

Initial public proposal
No information provided

TAG review
No information provided

TAG review status
Not applicable

Risks


Interoperability and Compatibility
This feature doesn't imply any interoperability risk, but the contrary, since Chrome needs to catch up in order to provide the same functionality than Firefox and Safari. There is no back-compatibility risk, because the old syntax is still valid if this feature is implemented.

Gecko: Shipped/Shipping

WebKit: Shipped/Shipping

Web developers: Positive (https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40468636) The issue has 15 votes by now.

Other signals:

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

No information provided


Debuggability
The feature can be tested and debugged using the regular Chrome DevTools support (eg, css style inspection)

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?
Yes
This feature is implemented in the blink's style module of the web engine, so it's shared among all the platforms.

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?
Yes
https://wpt.fyi/results/css/css-backgrounds/parsing?label=master&label=experimental&aligned&q=background-position-x https://wpt.fyi/results/css/css-backgrounds/parsing?label=master&label=experimental&aligned&q=background-position-y

Flag name on about://flags
No information provided

Finch feature name
No information provided

Non-finch justification
This is a catch-up change to align Chrome with the rest of the major web engines (Firefox and Safari). It affects blink only and enables a new syntax for a CSS property that Chrome already exposes to the web.

Rollout plan
Will ship enabled for all users

Requires code in //chrome?
False

Tracking bug
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40468636

Estimated milestones
Shipping on desktop143
Shipping on Android143
Shipping on WebView143


Anticipated spec changes

Open questions about a feature may be a source of future web compat or interop issues. Please list open issues (e.g. links to known github issues in the project for the feature specification) whose resolution may introduce web compat/interop risk (e.g., changing to naming or structure of the API in a non-backward-compatible way).

No information provided

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status
https://chromestatus.com/feature/5073321259565056?gate=5131252113997824

Links to previous Intent discussions
Intent to Prototype: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/68d10a08.710a0220.5367c.009d.GAE%40google.com


This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

Daniel Bratell

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Oct 29, 2025, 10:57:41 AM (7 days ago) Oct 29
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LGTM1

/Daniel

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Mike Taylor

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Nov 4, 2025, 10:25:35 AM (yesterday) Nov 4
to Javier Fernandez, Daniel Bratell, Chromestatus, blin...@chromium.org

Sebastian Zartner

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8:41 AM (4 hours ago) 8:41 AM
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For the record, there's no official publication of CSS Backgrounds 4 yet and it still claims it is not ready for implementation.

Therefore I am currently working towards a First Public Working Draft, see https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/13062.

Sebastian

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Chris Harrelson

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8:55 AM (4 hours ago) 8:55 AM
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