State Of CSS 2024 Results

They’re out! Like many of you, I look forward to these coming out every year. I don’t put much stock in polls, but they can be insightful and provide insight into the CSS zeitgeist. There are a few little nuggets in this year’s results that I find interesting. But before I get to that, you should also check out what others have already written about it.

Oh, I guess that’s it – at least it’s the most formal article I’ve ever seen. There is a small summary by Ahmad Shadeed at the end of the survey, which generally rounds things off. I’ll add more links as I find them.

In no particular order…

Demographics

Josh thinks about this much more carefully than I do. He rightly points out discrepancies in gender pay and regional pay, with men being paid much more than women (a nonsensical and frustratingly endless trend) and the United States having more salaries above $100,000 than anywhere else. The countries with the highest salaries were also the most represented in the survey responses, so the results are perhaps no surprise. We’re essentially looking at a snapshot of what it’s like to be a rich, white male developer in the West.

In addition to the pay, I also noticed the demographics of the age groups. As an aging front-ender I often wonder what we all do when we finally reach retirement age. A few years ago, I officially dropped from the most represented age group (30-39, 42%) to the third most represented age group (40-49, 21%). The days of hanging out with the cool kids are long gone (20-29, 27%).

And if the distribution is realistic, I will quickly enter my senior years and be only slightly more represented than those entering the workforce. I don’t know if anyone else in this industry is similarly concerned about aging – but if you’re one of the 484 people who identify with the 50+ age group, I’d like to talk to you.

Before we go any further, I think it’s worth pointing out how relatively “new” most people are to front-end development.

Wow! A whopping forty-four percent of respondents have less than 10 years of experience. Yes, 10 years is a high threshold, but we are still talking about a profession that has been remembered in recent times.

To illustrate, someone who had been developing for ten years entered the field around 2014. This was just when we got Flexbox, and a few years after the big bang of CSS 3 and HTML 5. That’s close half from developers who never had to deal with the problems of table layouts, clearfix hacks, image sprites, spacer images and gridded rounded corners. Ethan Marcotte’s seminal article on “Responsive web design” is a whopping four years older than these people!

This is just wild. And exciting. I am firmly convinced of this the next generation of front ends but we always hope that they learn from our past mistakes and Become a master of the basics.

Features

I’m not quite sure what to make of this section. If there are so many CSS features, how do you determine which ones are used the most? How do you reduce it to just 50 features? How are filter Are effects really the most widely used CSS feature? So many questions, but the results are still always interesting.

What I find most interesting are these not used enough Features. For example, hanging-punctuation ranks last in usage (1.57%), but is the feature that most developers (52%) have on their device Reading list. (If you need reading material on this, Chris originally published it the almanac entry for hanging-punctuation in 2013.)

I also see anchor positioning at the end of the long end with a reported usage of 4.8%. This will certainly increase now that we have at least one supporting browser engine (Chromium), but also given all the tutorials that have emerged over the last few months. Yes, we contributed to that noise…but it’s good noise! I think Juan published what could be the most thorough and thoughtful guide on the subject still.

I’m happy to see that Cascade Layers is right in the middle at a pretty robust 18.7%. Cascade layers are super accessible and elegantly designed, so these days I find it hard to believe anyone who says that CSS cascade is difficult to manage. And although @scope is currently at the bottom of the list (4.8%, same as anchor positioning), I’d bet with the crumpled gum wrapper in my bag that the overall mood of working with the Cascade will improve dramatically. We’ll still see plenty of “CSS is Awesome” memes, but over time they’ll become more like familiar dad jokes.

(Aside: Have you seen that? suggested designs for a new CSS logo? You can vote on it since yesterday, but previous versions plays off the meaning “CSS is great” beautifully.)

Interestingly, viewport devices come in at #11 with a utilization of 44.2%… putting them in 11th place #2 for most experience developers have with CSS layout. Does this mean layout features are used less frequently than CSS filters? So many questions again.

Frameworks

How many of you were surprised that Tailwind overtook Bootstrap? Top Dog framework in CSS land? Nobody, right?

What’s more interesting to me is that “No CSS Framework” comes in at number 13 out of 21 list frameworks. Sure, its 46 votes are dwarfed by Material UI’s 138 at number 10… but the fact that we even see “no framework” as a ranking option would have been unimaginable just three years ago.

The same applies to CSS pre-/post-processing. Sass (67%) and PostCSS (38%) are the power players, but None is third at 19%, ahead of Less, Stylus and Lightning CSS.

It’s a real testament to the great work CSSWG is doing to make CSS better every day. We can’t thank CSSWG enough – thank you, team! You are all heroes in this area.

CSS usage

Josh already has a good idea that only 67% of people say they test their work on mobile phones. It should be at least On par with the 99% testing on desktops, right? Right?! Who knows, maybe some answers will consider things like desktop functionality in “Responsive Design Mode” as the equivalent of testing on real mobile devices. I find it hard to believe that only 67% of us test mobile devices.

Oh, and The Great Divide is still alive and well if the results are true and 53% write more JavaScript than CSS in their everyday life.

Missing CSS features

It’s always an interesting topic to think about. Some of the most wanted CSS features were lurks for about 10+ years. But let’s take a look at the top 3 from this year’s survey:

• Mixins
• Conditional logic
• Masonry

We are on the lucky team! There is movement on all three fronts:

resources

At this point I’m allowed to do a little bit of self-help because CSS-Tricks is still number one among you when it comes to the blogs you follow when it comes to CSS events.

I’m also happy to see Smashing Magazine there too. It was the fifth in 2023 and I would like to believe that this increase will be the case because I joined the team last year. Correlation implies causation, Amirite?

But look at Kevin Powell and Josh in the top 10. This is just great. It speaks volumes about their teaching talents and the hard work they put in to “help people fall in love with CSS,” as Kevin would put it. I was able to help Kevin with some of his videos last year (here). one) and can tell you that he cares deeply about making CSS accessible and fun.

Honestly, the rankings aren’t what we live for. Now this I got a new wind to work on CSS tricksI only want to publish things that are valuable for your daily work as a front-ender. This has traditionally been done as a stream of daily articles, but is shifting to include more tutorials and resources Leader (we have published four new this year), Take notes about interesting developments and highlighting good work with linksor Expansion of the old almanac to explain things like Features, at rulesAnd Pseudos (we have a lot to do).

My choice for 2024

No one has asked my opinion, but I’ll say it anyway: Personal Blogging. I’m seeing more and more of us in the front-end community getting back behind the keyboard of our personal websites, and I’ve never subscribed to more RSS feeds than I do today. Some started blogging as a blog “worry stone” during the 2020 lockdown. Some have given up social networks as Twitter X imploded. Some got in IndieWeb. Weave rings And Guest books even gain new life. Sure, that could be the case difficult to keep upbut what a good problem! Let’s make RSS king once and for all.

That’s a wrap!

Seriously, a big thank you to Sacha Greif and the whole thing Devographics team for their commitment to putting together this survey each year. It’s always fun. And the visualizations are always a dream.