An increasing number of areas in the field of fracture mechanics is addressed by the phasefield method for fracture. The fast development and improvement of the method in the last decade led to successful applications in brittle fracture for elastic and inelastic materials, for fracture at impact loads, fatigue, cohesive fracture and many more. However, several fundamental issues, like low convergence rate and consistent irreversibility formulation, require further investigations in order to obtain a powerful tool for general application to fracture mechanics. The manuscript at hand summarises recent developments in phasefield-fracture towards a realistic deformation kinematics at cracks, which yields the framework of Representative Crack Elements.