Version 4.1 of the Astro web framework, released January 4, features new accessibility audit rules, custom cookie encoding, and a configuration option for the client:visible directive.

Available on GitHub, Astro is positioned as a framework for building fast, content-driven websites, web applications, and dynamic server APIs. Astro 4.1 adds two audit rules for the dev toolbar. Developers now will be warned about unsupported ARIA (accessible rich internet applications) attributes and missing attributes required for the ARIA role.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Intro to Astro: Clever lazy loading for JavaScript ]

Also in the new release, the client:visible directive now will accept a rootmargin option, allowing developers to specify a margin around the viewport to calculate visibility. This enables a component to be hydrated close to the viewport instead of waiting for it to be visible.

And Astro 4.1 allows encoding and decoding to be customized through encode and decode functions and when setting and getting cookies. For example, developers could bypass the default encoding to encodeURIComponent when adding a URL as part of a cookie.

Astro 4.1 release notes can be accessed from GitHub. Astro 4.1 follows the December 5, 2023, release of Astro 4.0, which featured faster builds, new APIs, and a development tool for the local development environment.

The Astro framework has popularized a front-end architecture called islands, which help developers avoid monolithic JavaScript patterns.