research – CSS-Tricks https://css-tricks.com Tips, Tricks, and Techniques on using Cascading Style Sheets. Wed, 21 Dec 2022 15:04:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.1 https://i0.wp.com/css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/star.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 research – CSS-Tricks https://css-tricks.com 32 32 45537868 2022 Roundup of Web Research https://css-tricks.com/2022-roundup-of-web-research/ https://css-tricks.com/2022-roundup-of-web-research/#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2022 15:03:50 +0000 https://css-tricks.com/?p=375869 We’ve started making a tradition of rounding up the latest front-end research at the end of each year. We did it in 2020 and again in 2021. Reports are released throughout the year by a bunch of different companies …


2022 Roundup of Web Research originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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We’ve started making a tradition of rounding up the latest front-end research at the end of each year. We did it in 2020 and again in 2021. Reports are released throughout the year by a bunch of different companies and organizations researching everything from web design trends to developer skills to popular coding languages and so many other things.

Last year, it seemed the overarching trend was around remote work and its impact on developer productivity and workplace environments. We also saw TailwindCSS continue to explode in usage, dismal accessibility on the top 1 million websites, and a massive growth in API usage, among other findings.

So, what’s in store for this year? Read on to find out.

Table of contents

HTTP Archive Annual State of the Web

What it is: A study that looks at 8.3 million websites sourced from the Chrome UX Report that analyzes how the sites were made, breaking things up into sections that include page content, user experience, content publishing, and content distribution. The CSS chapter is written by Rachel Andrew (so you know it’s good) and reviewed by folks that include Chris Lilley and CSS-Tricks contributor Jens Oliver Meiert.

What it found: The last two years has shows that CSS continues to contribute to overall page weight. This year was no exception, with CSS weight increasing 7% at the 90th percentile. That’s on par with past years.

What was the most popular class name in 2022? .active. But you also see a bunch of vendor-specific prefixes in the list, like .fa- for Font Awesome, and many for WordPress, such as .wp-, .has-large-font-size, and .has-pale-cyan-blue-background-color (phew!) which I guess is an indication of what the most popular background color is for WordPress sites.

The report also shows pixels as the most commonly used CSS unit for the font-size property. Maybe we’ll see that number trend down next year after Josh Collinsworth published why that’s not a great idea.

There’s so much more to read in here that goes beyond CSS and is worth checking out.

The WebAIM Million 2022

What it is: An evaluation of the accessibility of the top one million as evaulated by the WAVE stand-alone API. That group of sites consists of domains pulled from from the Majestic Millions listthe Alexa Top 1,000,000 web sites, and the DomCop top 10 million domains.

What it found: Well, hey, look at that! The number of distinct accessibility errors has decreased 1.1% since February 2021. That’s modest improvement, but we’re still looking at a grand total of 50,829,406 errors — or an average of 50.8 errors per site — and those are just the ones that could be detected! I think we’d all do well taking time to read Hidde de Vries’s post on how to fix the common accessibility issues outlined in the report.

State of CSS 2022 Survey

What it is: This survey pokes at CSS usage each year, surveying developers on the features they use, as well as their understanding of and satisfaction with them. Co-creator Sacha Greif openly wondered if there is too much CSS in a post he wrote right here on CSS-Tricks and a good part of that was based on the rising number of CSS features in recent years. This year’s survey garnered 8,714 responses from developers around the world.

What it found: Some really neat stuff this year. With all of the new CSS stuff that’s shipped in the past couple of years, there are still plenty of them that have yet to gain traction, whether it’s an awareness thing or the lack of browser support. For example, a whopping 46.7% of folks are only aware of 40% or less of the features covered in the survey. Container queries are a good example of a feature with awareness (58% have heard of it) but little use (12.6% have used it). The :has() selector is a glaring success with 54% knowing about it and 34.8% already using it.

There’s a lot more in here, like CSS-in-JS trends (interest is downward), accessibility features (needs more awareness), and which blogs y’all read (thanks for making CSS-Tricks #1!).

Oh, and don’t miss Lea Verou’s conclusion, which predicts that CSS nesting and color manipulation will rule in 2023. I agree. Nesting would be a game-changer that could put a dent in CSS preprocessor usage. And there are so many new color features today and in the works that are sure to impact the way we define and use colors. But I also suspect that @container becomes a much bigger deal as browser support catches on and we find ourselves writing more container queries where we may have reached for media queries in the past.

Interop 2022 Dashboard

What it is: This is more of a live dashboard than a report. It analyzes data from a fixed point in time, displaying results from the web-platform-tests which are a group of test suites for many web platform specifications that run daily. The idea is that we can see which web features are broadly supported, which ones aren’t, and how browsers rank in terms of supporting them.

What it found: It’s less about what this dashboard has found than what it is currently showing. And right now, Safari is leading the pack as far as supporting what the focus areas are for 2022, which include newer features like Cascade Layers, Container Queries, the <dialog> element, Subgrid, and viewport units. Safari scores 89% in the tests, with Firefox right on its heels at 88% and Chrome/Edge not far behind at 84%.

If you look at the scores for the experimental versions of those browsers, Safari Technology Preview jumps way up to 94% while Firefox and Chrome/Edge sit at 88%. It’s really tough to make the whole “Safari is the new Internet Explorer” point these days, at least when it comes to these focus areas. There are other legitimate criticisms of it for way different reasons that are tied to iOS.

Jamstack Community Survey 2022

What it is: A survey of approximately 7,000 members of the Jamstack community that provides a snapshop of who Jamstack developers are and the sorts of things they’re working on.

What it found: This survey is interesting as heck because it offers a peek into things like job titles and employment on top of Jamstack-specific stuff. For example, four out of five developers are now working remote most of the time and half of those would quit their jobs if they had to return to the office.

Here’s another neat trend: In 2021, 32% of folks referred to themselves as “full-stack developers” in 2021 while 45% called themselves “front-end developers”. That practically swapped in 2022, with 44% of respondents calling themselves “full-stack” and 32% going with “front-end”.

You’ve gotta look at the full set of results to get even more insights on what Jamstack developers are building and how they are building those things. Like, WordPress is still the most widely-used CMS at 59% of respondents (22% of which is headless WordPress), but surprisingly, Notion is quickly gaining traction in the Jamstack CMS space, at 26%. I’ve been interested in Notion as a CMS ever since Chris wrote about it 2020.

2022 State of Open Source

What it is: A survey of 2,660 developers by the Open Source Initiative and OpenLogic that tracks the usage of open source projects and contributions to them. The survey was open for six weeks and attracted responses from 15 countries.

What it found: The Open Source Initiative published their 10 takeaways from the report. Among those? 79% say they sponsor open source organizations (which might be expected from this audience). Deeper in the report, jQuery (31%) is still ranked as the top technology for app development. React (27%) clocks in at second, and Angular (26%) comes in at third.

StackOverflow 2022 Developer Survey

What it is: A survey of more than 70,000 developers to measure how they learn, which tools they’re using, and what they want in the future.

What it found: I love this survey because it always affirms the amount of time I spend looking things up. 87% of folks spend at least 30 minutes searching for answers to problems, 25% of which spend an hour or more. The survey found that a team of 50 developers spends between 333-651 hours of time looking up answers per week.

Otherwise, JavaScript is the most used language for the tenth year in a row (but Rust is the most loved) and VS Code is the overwhelmingly popular IDE at 74%.

GitHub’s 2022 State of the Octoverse

What it is: Straight from the horse’s mouth: “An exploration of open source software including its impact on the world and companies, plus key trends shaping software development.” It draws on GitHub activity data rather than surveying a group of respondents.

What it found: Whew, 94 million developers used GitHub in 2022! That’s a whole lot more than the 2.8 million who used it in 2012. 20.5 million newbies joined this year alone. Also, there was a 20% year-over-year growth in the number of repos hosted on GitHub, and more than 3.5 billion contributions to GitHub projects over the year. Interestingly, only 20% of all GitHub repos are public, perhaps due to private repos becoming a free feature in 2019.

Nothing new has changed on the languages front. Last year, JavaScript was the most used language and that’s true this year as well. However, TypeScript seems to have slowed down in growth after skyrocketing in popularity last year. I suspected it would jump up a few spots this year, but it’s still in fourth behind Python and Java (which is far from dead).

GitHub Copilot’s impact on developer productivity and happiness

What it is: GitHub published a report on GitHub Copilot, its AI-flavored development assistant. Is Copilot making developers’ lives easier? Is it making them more productive? Those are the sorts of things covered in this report, drawing on survey results they published in an academic paper, and external research on development productivity. There’s good qualitiative feedback in there as well.

What it found: Can you guess it? Yep, those who use Copilot feel more productive than those who do not use it. And those who use it complete tasks ~55% faster than those who do not use it for the same tasks. What it sounds like, if I’m reading this right, is that Copilot users enjoy the way it handles all the “fiddly” things for them — like auto-closing brackets.

Dave’s thoughts on Copilot seem to jive with the report’s description of Copilot being like a pair programmer with a calculator attached. Maybe not the best pair programmer in the world, but one in which your mental model shifts from writing code to checking code.

The Software House State of Frontend 2022

What it is: A survey of 3,703 developers to “see the real day-to-day perspective from [front-end] professionals of all levels and backgrounds.” What makes this survey a little different is that it also polls 19 invited experts in the field, including — you guessed it — Chris Coyier weighing in on styling tools.

What it found: You know, there’s really more findings here than a mere summary can do justice. This might be the most comprehensive set of results of the whole bunch. There’s so much to grok, from frameworks, hosting, and SSG to browser technologies, code management, and testing. And that only scratches the surface. If nothing else, it’s worth clicking through to the full report just for the analysis from the invited experts.

Sparkbox 2022 Design Systems Survey

What it is: A survey all about design systems that’s focused on adoption, contributions, design, technical debt, and how design systems are used. This year’s results reflect the answers of 219 submissions, down from last year’s 376.

What it found: Last year, the survey found that 40% of folks consider their design systems “successful” or “very” successful. Those figures are less obvious in this year’s survey. But more interesting is what’s included in their systems. Sure, typography, colors, components, and layouts are common to most of them. But it’s the lack of things like developer-ready code (65%), accessibility guidelines (57%), and content guidelines (45%) that might be influencing the finding that only 65% of people who identify as design system subscribers say they get what they need from their systems.

UXTools.co 2022 Design Tools Survey

What it is: The sixth edition of a survey that looks at the tooling people use for things like prototyping, UI design, design systems, and user testing. This year received 4,260 submissions.

What it found: First off, we’re dealing with a bunch of designers. 82% have “designer” somewhere in their job title, compared to a mere 6% who call themselves developers. That’s reasonable for a survey that’s all about UX tooling.

So, what tools are they using? Figma by a loooooong mile for UI design. 73% report Figma as their design software of choice, followed by a neck-and-neck race between Adode XD (6%) and Sketch (5%) for a distant second. Figma also leads the pack when it comes to basic UI protoyping and managing design systems.

Do you want to know the top tool for storing, tagging, and organizing research? It’s Notion! Funny how it comes up as both an emerging CMS and a research repository in different surveys.

2023 HackerRank Developer Skills Report

What it is: A survey of HankerRank community members and their development skills, such as the languages they use and their experience with them.

What it found: I don’t know! I tried several times to download the report, but got nothing more than a spinning wheel. The link to the report takes you to a sneak peek with some basic findings, like the top five used languages — Java, Python, SQL, C++, and JavaScript, in that order — make up the overwhelming majority of all reported languages. There’s also findings on the fastest growing languages, which is where TypeScript (182%), PHP (172%), and Go (125%) are dominant. Swift usage fell hard at -42% which is interesting considering the findings in the next survey we’re going to look at.

Tower Git Mac Dev Survey 2022

What it is: A survey of 2,506 developers (down from last year’s 4,072) working on the MacOS platform with the goal of understanding the profile of this specific developer niche.

What it found: Last year’s takeaway was the age of this crowd trending younger, suggesting a growth in Mac-related development. And lots of them really wanted to learn Swift. What changed? Not a whole lot! Most developer are still in the 30-44 age range (40.9%) even though that’s significantly down from 54.8% last year. And the largest age group (19.5%) is in the 35-39 range. They still work with JavaScript most (52.7%) and still want to learn Swift the most (28.2%).

Developer Nation 2022 Q1 Pulse Report

What it is: A report is based on a global online developer survey designed, produced, and carried out by SlashData over ten weeks between December 2021 and February 2022 to measure developer trends, technology preferences, and emerging technology patterns.

What it found: I like that this report breaks down its demographics by gender. And while the result is unsurprising — there are way more men (81%) than women (17%) — it’s still a confirmation of the almost tangible dismal gender equality in the development industry as a whole.

Wanna know this survey’s top five programming languages? It’s exactly the same as HackerRank’s top five, with one exception: C# knocked JavaScript off the list. I also find it interesting that the top emerging area of interest for this group is artificial intelligence software, beating out augmented reality, robotics, cryptocurrency, and blockchain. Maybe some of these folks are the ones influencing GitHub’s Copilot research findings?

Postman 2022 State of the API Report

What it is: A survey of more than 37,000 developers (up from 28,000 last year and 13,500 in 2020!) that measures who is developing with APIs, what sort of work they’re doing with them, and how APIs are evolving.

What it found: Last year, I reported this:

67% of developers say they’ve adopted an API-first philosophy and 94% say they believe their companies will either invest more or the same in APIs in the next year. We’ll see when those results roll in next year!

The same data point this year says that number is down to 89% — and with a larger pool of survey participants. That said, Postman API requests skyrocketed from 855 million last year to 1.13 billion this year. Wow. I’d say last year’s prediction that more companies would investment in API usage this year is spot on.

The most popular APIs? That group includes known entities like Salesforce and Twitter, but welcomes Notion to the list — it’s really been a banner year for Notion according to many of the surveys in this roundup.

CodeinWP WordPress Hosting Survey 2022

What it is: A survey all about WordPress hosting that polls people who read the CodeinWP blog. They received 3,400 submissions this year. They’ve apparently been doing this survey since 2016 but it’s slipped under my radar until this year.

What it found: GoDaddy is the hosting provider of choice for this group, which was the story in 2019 and 2020 as well. But it only represents 11.8% of survey participants. The market is pretty crowded with Bluehost (8.4%), Hostinger (4.8%), and HostGator (3.4%) trailing behind. LOLzzz for GoDaddy also falling dead last in hosting satisfaction with 6.3/10 satisfaction rate. WP Engine got the top rating score (9.2/10) but that’s based on just 21 survey participants, compared to GoDaddy’s 377. Plus, the survey notes that many specified “WordPress” as their host… which could either mean they use WordPress.com or are simply confused between WordPress.com and a self-hosted WordPress site. 🤷‍♂️

WordPress LMS Websites: A Data Study

What it is: Let’s look at another WordPress-centric survey while we’re at it. This one is run by a group called Sell Courses Online, which is a dead giveaway that it’s focused on learning management systems (LMS) in the WordPress ecosystem.

What it found: I admit I’m super interested in this report because I teach web development in higher education and have played with a bunch of LMSs. WordPress is ripe software for for it, too, with quite a few plugin options. It’s super affordable as well, with most folks (41.3%) spending less than $50/month on their tech stack, and 76.2% spending less than $250. Most of those low-spend sites rely on a freemium-based LMS model.

And what’s included in that stack? 65.3% rely on WooCommerce for selling courses, 57.5% use Elementor as a page builder, 19% use the Astra theme (while 66% specify others), and 13.5% use Paid Memberships Pro for user accounts.

Hey, what about the actual LMS functionality? LearnDash is is the most popular LMS plugin with 34%, followed by LearnPress (31%) and Tutor LMS (19%). I’ve worked with LearnDash and love it, especially the number of add-ons to extend the functionality with more features as needed.

UN E-Government Survey 2022

What it is: It’s funny, but I have a degree in Economics that I clearly haven’t used in my professional career, and there’s a bunch of stuff in here that’s way over my head. What it boils down to, if I’m understanding correctly, is that this report measures the online development of governments across United Nations member states, drawing on a composite of three different indices.

Has the United States progressed in its digital infrastructure and strategies? That’s the sort of thing this report looks at, taking in factors like what online services a country provides, how it approaches cybersecurity, efforts to increase digital proficiencies, and even how technology has been used to address crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first survey was published in 2001. This 2022 survey is the eleventh edition of this biennial publication.

What it found: Honestly, you’d do better reading the press release (PDF) than relying on my uneducated insights. But at a super high level, Denmark, Finland and the Republic of Korea lead the 2022 digital government rankings, “scoring the highest when it comes to the scope and quality of online services, status of telecommunication infrastructure and existing human capacity.”

LinkedIn 2022 Workplace Learning Report

What it is: The name of the report sorta says it all — LinkedIn looks at the state of the professional learning landscape in workplaces. This is the sixth edition, surveying 1,444 learning and development professionals (L&D), and 610 learners in November 2021.

A lot of this year’s report is written around the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on learning in the workplace, like how learning has been affected by layoffs and remote work arrangements.

What it found: Learning continues despite The Great Reshuffle/Great Resignation or whatever you want to call the relatively new trend of quitting jobs and changing careers. For example, 46% of L&D professionals say there is a wider technological skill gap on their teams, and 49% say execs are concerned that employees do not have the right skills to meet business strategies. That suggests the post-pandemic technological landscape has created higher expectations as far as employees having relevant technical skills, particularly when it comes to what’s needed for successful remote work.

That, in turn, has led to a rise in demand for workplace learning programs and profressionals. L&D professionals are in higher demand and make more money than they did before. And only 8% expect their L&D budget to decrease in the coming year.

What sorts of learning programs have top priority? Diversity, equity, and inclusion (45%), leading through change programs (42%), in-person training (41%, up from 25%!), upskilling and reskilling (41%), and digital fluency (30%). A lot of soft skills in there!

UpWork: The Great Work Teardown

What it is: While we’re on the topic of changing workplace environments, let’s look at this one that investigates the workplace trends that are changing perspectives on when, where, and how people work — and how businesses are adapting to those changing perspectives.

What it found: The stats are super interesting, but I couldn’t find any information on the methodology it used to get them. Like 50% of businesses have reported higher turnover compared to pre-pandemic times, 38% plan to spend more on independent remote freelancers, and 37% are fully remote today with 28% expecting to go fully remote in a year. What’s going to happen to all those empty office buildings?!

On the employee side of things, 61% say they are more productive when they work remote. 45% of business also report an increase in productivity as a result of remote work and a whopping 63% reduction in unscheduled work absences.

There are other interesting stats on how other things are changing, like traditional work hours, where people choose to work, and the perception of workplace culture.

What it is: Another one from UpWork! This time it’s looking at the overall labor market. And there’s a documented methodology this time, saying that numbers are based on survey results of 1,000 hiring professionals from a third-party as well as findings from a separate study from a separate firm that surveyed 6,000 working professionals.

What it found: Well, UpWork’s “Great Work Teardown” report found that there’s big growth in business relying on remote freelancers. This report confirms that 78% of hiring pros saying they’ve used remote freelancers and 52% saying they are using more of them today than they have in previous years.

Get this: 60% of managers at mid-sized companies report higher turnover since pre-pandemic levels, while only 25% of small companies report the same. And roughly 45% of all hiring managers say they plan to combat turnover by offering more learning programs, confirming LinkedIn’s workplace learning report.

And, hey, if you’re looking for a higher salary or more perks, this might be the time to to strike because around 50% of managers are considering higher salaries and bigger benefit packages to retain staff.

Reblaze 2022 State of Web Security Survey

What it is: This survey is new to the collection! It asked 300 web security pros what they consider to be their biggest online threats and how they plan on defending against them.

What it found: The most common attacks were DDoS, with half of the survey’s participants saying they’ve dealt with them in the past year. Next up is SQL injections (38%) and ransomware (29%), where ransomware is considered the most severe threat. (The report also cites a U.S. Treasury finding that U.S. firms paid out $590 million in ransomware attacks in the first half of 2021 alone. Geez.)

Also neat: 90% of participants say they are using a public cloud, making cloud-based security more of a thing. (AWS tops the list at 67%. DigitalOcean (4%), the home for CSS-Tricks, is sandwiched between Oracle (7%) and IBM (3%) as an interesting aside.)

API security is tops as far as priority goes. With Postman’s State of the API report showing a year-over-year increase in API requests that goes from 855 million last year to 1.13 billion this year, it’s clear why that is.

(Linking directly to the PDF to save you the registration effort.)

Trend Micro 2022 Midyear Cybersecurity Report

What it is: Let’s keep talking cybersecurity. This report polls 6,297 IT security decision-makers from 29 countries about their thoughts on the cybersecurity risks they face.

What it found: A good chunk of folks (62%) say they have blindspots in their defense strategies and 43% belive that that their exposure to threats is out of control. That’s in line with the Reblaze survey above that reported 50% of folks saying they have no certainty as far as how many bots account for overall traffic. This report notes that 37% of participants cite cloud assets as the area they have the least insight into.

The report gets into a bunch of specific attacks that I had no idea were even a thing. It’s unnerving how attacks seem to get smarter and smarter each year while the businesses continue to increase their exposure to them. This report provides a lot of excellent detail on those threats, including a section devoted to cybersecurity efforts in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

1Password: The realities of parenting and growing up online

What it is: Let’s heap more on the cybersecurity research pile will this report from the folks behind the 1Password app. This one hits pretty close to home for me because it looks at parenting in the always-online era, which is something pinned to the back of my mind since I have two young daughters who love their screens.

1Password teamed up with Malwarebytes to produce this report, which is based on a survey of 1,000 parents and 1,000 children that were born between 1997-2009 that was prepared by another firm, Method Research. The data is fresh having been collected in August this year.

What it found: A bunch of stats I wish I could unsee. Like 74% of parents think they’re keeping their kids safe, while only 51% agree. And 74% of kids have ways to workaround being monitored by their parents (where 9% claim to have a secret device their parents don’t know about). Cyberbullying is the top concern for both parents (73%) and kids (66%).

Parents also need to be more responsible. 73% of kids wish their parents would ask for permission to post photos of them while only 34% of parents actually ask (and — eek! — 39% don’t believe they need to ask permission). The importance here is that 11% of kids say they’ve been stalked or bullied because of something posted by their parents, and 12% report being harmed in some way, whether its hacked accounts, stolen identities, or tarnished credit cores.

The Eclipse Foundation 2022 IoT & Edge Developer Survey

What it is: A survey of 910 global developers, committers, architects, and decision-makers that took place between April and June 2022 to spot trends in the Internet of Things (IoT) space. You know, like that smart fridge in your kitchen and voice-controlled curtains that shade your living room. That and more serious stuff like trends in artificial intelligence and edge computing.

What it found: Last year, I called Microsoft’s IoT findings “mostly nice trivia for cocktail chatter.” This report is a lot more granular and is probably most helpful for those working in the space, as there’s so much information on the stacks that developers use and overarching concerns about them. I mean, I don’t particularly care that “64-bit ARM architectures are gaining ground with gateway and edge node suppliers.” But I bet that’s super important to some of you reading this.

(Linking directly to the PDF to save you the registration effort.)

CampaignMonitor Ultimate Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2022

What it is: A study of benchmarks related to email marketing based on 100 billion emails delivered on CampaignMonitor’s platform in 2021. It looks at things like open and click rates, and breaks them down by industry to help folks get the most out of their email marketing campaigns and know how to gauge success.

What it found: It’s probably better for you to see their table of results by industry rather than having me regurgitate the results of all 19 industries they identified. But on a global level, a 21.5% open rate is quite average across all industries, as is a 2.3% click-through rate. It appears Monday produces the highest open rate (22% on average) while Sunday produces the lowest (20.3%), so not a whole lot of variance there. Same deal with click-through rates, where Tuesday is highest (2.4%) and Saturday and Sunday share the lowest rate (2.1%). Again, not a lot of difference but it could be helpful knowing this stuff if you’re trying to milk every last drop out of a campaign.

Wrapping up

We looked at 27 different reports on front-end and front-end-adjacent topics! That’s more than the 25 we covered last year and the fitting number of 20 we looked at in 2020.

If there’s one BIG takeaway from all these takeaways, it’s to remember this is all in good fun. Many of the studies lack the scientific methods we’d want to base decisions on, and the sample sizes are far too small to accurately reflect reality. But they sure are interesting, right?!

Some reports are annual, some are one-off, and others seemingly happen whenever the heck they wanna do it. So, if I missed any from previous years, it’s probably because they aren’t annual or just aren’t available as I’m writing this. As always, let me know if there’s a report I missed and I’ll try to work it in.

There are more reports on the way! In fact, you can take the 2022 State of JavaScript survey and the 2022 WordPress Annual Survey as this is being written. Have at ’em!


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State of CSS 2022 Survey Now Open https://css-tricks.com/state-of-css-2022-survey-now-open/ https://css-tricks.com/state-of-css-2022-survey-now-open/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2022 18:35:09 +0000 https://css-tricks.com/?p=374217 The State of CSS survey recently opened up. Last year, the survey confirmed everyone’s assumptions that TailwindCSS is super popular and CSS variables are mainstream. It also codified what many of us want from CSS, from Container Queries to …


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The State of CSS survey recently opened up. Last year, the survey confirmed everyone’s assumptions that TailwindCSS is super popular and CSS variables are mainstream. It also codified what many of us want from CSS, from Container Queries to a parent selector. (Spoiler alert, we now have both of ’em.)

While I wouldn’t say the results have been super surprising each year, this time I’m excited to start seeing more historical trends reveal themselves. The survey has been running since 2019, so that’s going to be four years (ancient in front-end years!) of data to see if certain frameworks came and went, specific features are gaining momentum, what general learning practices are out there, and just plain more context. It takes time for stuff to build up like this, so kudos to Sacha Greif for keeping this thing going.

And speaking of the team behind the survey, Lea Verou is new to the bunch and lead this year’s edition. Lea made some nice additions, including more open-ended comments, questions about browser inconsistencies, and a question that compares the amount of time you write CSS versus JavaScript.

Browsers actually use this stuff to help prioritize what features to work on — so definitely add your voice to the mix! The polls close on October 20.

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2021 Roundup of Web Research https://css-tricks.com/2021-roundup-of-web-research/ https://css-tricks.com/2021-roundup-of-web-research/#comments Thu, 23 Dec 2021 18:34:04 +0000 https://css-tricks.com/?p=359205 Last year, we kicked out a roundup of published surveys, research, and other findings from around the web. There were some nice nuggets in there, like a general sentiment that the web needs more documentation, Tailwind CSS dun


2021 Roundup of Web Research originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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Last year, we kicked out a roundup of published surveys, research, and other findings from around the web. There were some nice nuggets in there, like a general sentiment that the web needs more documentation, Tailwind CSS dun got big, TypeScript is the second most beloved language, and that the top one million sites are “dismal” when it comes to accessibility.

Among many other findings, of course.

Now, as 2021 winds to a close and many of us tend to reflect back on the past year, let’s do that once again. It is pretty interesting to not only see what trends are emerging in our industry (and those adjacent to it) but how those trends, you know, trend over time.

Once again, in no particular order:

HTTP Archive Annual State of the Web

What it is: A study that looks at 8.2 million websites sourced from the Chrome UX Report that analyzes how the sites were made, breaking things up into sections that include page content, user experience, content publishing, and content distribution. The CSS chapter is written by Eric Meyer and Shuvam Manna, and reviewed by folks that include CSS-Tricks guest authors Adam Argyle and Lea Verou.

What it found: Last year, we saw CSS contributing more to overall page weight and that trend continued into this year with the median weight of a CSS file up 7.9% to around 70 KB. There’s so much great data in here to dig through, but here’s one eye-opening stat: this year set the record for most external stylesheets loaded by a page, coming in at a whopping 2,368 files, which is nearly double last year’s record total. It’s like someone is trying to win that sad race.

State of CSS 2021

What it is: An annual look at CSS, surveying developers on the features they use, as well as their understanding of and satisfaction with them. Co-creator Sacha Greif has written about the survey here on CSS-Tricks in the past (including why CSS needs a survey at all). This year’s survey garnered 8,714 responses from developers around the world.

What it found: Welp, Tailwind CSS continues to explode (usage up from 26% to 39%). CSS variables were already mainstream in 2019 (59.6% usage) but are downright common (84.4%) these days. There are lots of little gems like this, but one more that specifically caught my eye is that the perception that CSS is “easy to learn” has subtly trended down between 2019 and 2021.

GitHub 2021 State of the Octoverse

What it is: This is sort of GitHub’s internal review of activity, like the number of users, repos, languages, and whatnot. Those numbers sort of reveal interesting things about our work-life balance, communities, and general activity.

What it found: Last year’s findings were interesting because developer activity spiked on GitHub between February and March 2020, signaling that people were actually busier as a result of the global pandemic, whether it be from employers or perhaps side projects. This year continues to show a sea change in the way we work, with more than 86% of respondents expecting to work either fully remote or in some sort of hybrid arrangement in the next year.

Also worth noting is that a lack of documentation continues to be an ongoing issue. Oh, and this survey shows TypeScript usage absolutely skyrocketing—it’s become the fourth most-used language on GitHub since it was released in 2017, supplanting PHP, which has fallen to sixth since 2019 (perhaps in part to WordPress continuing its transition to JavaScript).

Google Year in Search 2021

What it is: A report that the search giant releases each year highlighting top search terms, breaking them down into categories, including news, people, actors, definitions, recipes, and more.

What it found: I only find this report interesting because it’s sorta like a glimpse into the collective mind of users and what they search for on the web. Last year, I described it like flipping through a high school yearbook, and that’s still exactly how it feels, even if it isn’t directly related to front-end web design or development. For example, look at searches that include “how to be” in the query. The top search was “how to be eligible for a stimulus check,” followed by “how to be attractive” and “how to be happy alone.” So, I guess we’re collectively searching for how to be a better-looking rich person who is on a quest for happiness in the absence of companionship. Generalizations, FTW!

StackOverflow Developer Survey 2021

What it is: A survey of 80,000 developers (up from 65,000) that looks at the technologies they use and how they use them.

What it found: This report confirms what GitHub’s State of the Octoverse already shows us—TypeScript is growing. More interesting is a question that asks developers what they do when they are “stuck” on something. If you have ever beat yourself up for not knowing how to solve a particular thing, take solace in the fact that nearly 90% of developers are just like you and have to “Google it” too. If not that, then 80% head over to StackOverflow for ideas.

The [New] State of CSS in Angular

What it is: Last year, we looked at Angular’s general developer survey. This year, they have one devoted entirely to CSS. It’s more of a status update than a survey, but still interesting to see what the framework is prioritizing when it comes to the namesake language of this very website.

What it found: Again, no findings here. But Angular reports it has dropped support for Internet Explorer 11, which has opened the floodgates for other CSS features to make their way into the framework—things like CSS grid, logical properties, calc() and more.

JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem 2021

What it is: A survey of nearly 31,743 developers (up from 20,000) by JetBrains, maker of the popular PhpStorm IDE.

What it found: The key takeaways are published right up front in this report. Like last year, JavaScript is the most popular language. But unlike last year, JavaScript is also the language most developers are studying, taking over Python’s spot at the top.

The WebAIM Million 2021

A table showing percentage of homepages with specific types of issues in 2019, 2020, and 2021.

What it is: An evaluation of the accessibility of the top 1 million and over 100,000 additional interior pages. What are those top million sites? They include ones from the Majestic Millions list with additional page analysis coming from the Open PageRank Initiative and Alexa Top Sites.

What it found: Some good news—the number of distinct accessibility errors found in this year’s batch of sites is down 15.6%! The bad news? The report still found 51,379,694 errors overall, and those are only the ones they could detect. And even though there’s a decrease in the number of sites that contain WCAG 2 errors, it’s still 97.4% of all sites that were scanned which is a mind-blowing number. The leading issue? Low contrast text at 86.4% of all homepages in the study. We have lots of work left to do in this space.

WebAIM Survey of Web Accessibility Practitioners #3

Vertical bar chart showing what sort of training accessibility practitioners have. Online resources is the leading item, followed by job training, than peers, workshops, then conferences. Formal schooling comes in last at 12%.

What it is: This is the third WebAIM survey that polls web accessibility practitioners. The last one was done in 2018. What I like about this survey is that it paints a fairly nice picture of what it looks like to work in an accessibility role and the expectations that come with it.

What it found: Accessibility training and education really caught my attention. There is very little formal schooling in web accessibility (12.5%). Most of it comes from online resources (91.3%) and on-the-job training/experiences (83.4%). That seems like a huge opportunity for academia to swoop in and help grow the field.

WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey #9

Chart showing the trend of screen reader usage between 2009 and 2021. It shows JAWS is the leading reader, followed by NVDA, then VoiceOVER a distance third.JAWS and NVDA actually cross paths in August 2019 when NVDA briefly captured first place.

What it is: This is the ninth time WebAIM has surveyed people who use screen readers to browse the web. We often hear that knowing your audience is a good way to create better user experiences, and this survey is a nice broad look at an audience that often goes overlooked.

What it found: What’s the most cited disability? Blindness. Which screen reader is used the most? JAWS. How about on mobile? VoiceOver. How do most users find information on a page? Navigate through the headings. And, hey, 40% of respondents believe the web has gotten more accessible, but 60% believe it is either unchanged or has gotten worse (and they aren’t wrong based on the WebAIM Million report above).

CodinGame Developer Survey 2021

What it is: A survey of 15,000 (down from 20,000) developers and HR professionals, covering learning, skills, languages, and demographics. It’s a little glimpse into the hiring that goes into development roles.

What it found: The report cites several findings in the summary, like that 48% of companies offer the possibility to work 100% remote.

LinkedIn 2021 Workplace Learning Report

What it is: A voluntary survey of 5,154 (down from 6,607) working professionals that evaluates their career priorities, challenges, and motivations. This isn’t exactly focused on the front end. But given that LinkedIn Learning is now a core part of LinkedIn itself, and its archive of front-end videos and courses is growing, it feels like it could start to produce some interesting insights over time about what we’re learning and how we learn it.

What it found: Again, this is all about people’s career motivations more than it is about anything on the front end. But as a card-carrying member of Gen X, I found it interesting that Gen Z learners watched 50% more hours of learning content in 2020 than they did in 2019. On more of a sour note, though, only 40% of folks say their managers are actively challenging them to learn new skills. Seems like that number should be a lot higher since the report also shows that 59% consider “upskilling” and “reskilling” their top priority.

(Registration required)

HackerRank Innovator Report 2021

What it is: Insights on innovation and hiring trends in and around the tech industry.

What it found: “With the acceleration of digital transformation during the pandemic, every company is now prioritizing one thing: innovation.” Exactly what you might expect from the opening line of a report that is focused on—cough—innovation. Anyway, there is one jarring finding that says only 47% of respondents use skills as the foundation for creating a tech job description. That begs the question: what on earth is being used to write tech job descriptions? I’m reminded that job titles in our industry are all over the place and that the interview process can be just as bad.

Microsoft IoT Signals Report

What it is: A study on the growth, evolvement and use of the Internet of Things (IoT), a term used to describe physical objects taking on Internet capabilities, say a watch, lightbulb, or whatever. The study polled about 3,000 people with a 20-minute online survey.

What it found: Mostly nice trivia for cocktail chatter. 90% of companies report adopting IoT strategies, which is consistent with last year’s 91%. Personally, when I hear “Internet of Things,” my mind goes straight to smart refrigerators and more HomeKit-supported toys. But what these findings show is that technologies—like artificial intelligence and edge computing—are being used to automate business operations, manufacturing, and logistics in such ways that improve quality, consistency, and efficiency. Wondering how the pandemic has impacted the IoT? A large chunk of companies (44%) say it’s accelerated their IoT initiatives.

Developer Nation 2021 State of the Developer Survey

What it is: A survey of 19,000+ developers across 169 countries who work on a range of tech projects, from 5G and IoT to machine learning and apps for third-party platforms. It looks at things like developer demographics, workplace behavior, and various industry trends.

What it found: One question asks developers what, if anything, would make them leave their current employer and you might not be surprised that the leading factor is… drumroll… money. I would’ve expected something like 75% of folks to say that, but the actual figure is 50%. Those who wouldn’t change their employer for anything? That would be 10%. I love subjective hypotheticals like this.

(Registration required)

UpWork Freelance Forward 2021

What it is: UpWork’s second annual survey that checks on the current state of freelancing, including the effect Covid has had on it, and what we might expect in the future.

What it found: The percentage of freelancers who provide skilled services is 53%, up from 50% in 2020 and 45% in 2019. Also, 56% of non-freelancers say they are likely to freelance in the future. Much of that likely has to do with the current “Great Resignation” of workers leaving their jobs post-pandemic as work becomes more remote and flexible. Oh, and 44% of freelancers say they make more money freelancing that what they believe they could get working for a “traditional” employer… so maybe that group of developers in the Developer Nation study who say money is the biggest factor for leaving a job ought to look into freelancing instead. 🤑

UXTools.co 2021 Design Tools Survey

What it is: A survey of 3,359 designers to find out who they are, what they do, and what sort of tools they’re using this year to bridge the physical gaps left by the rise of working from home.

What it found: The first thing that stood out to me is that “product designer” is the leading job title (31%) that respondents use to identify themselves. That’s slightly ahead of “UX designer” (30%), but leaps past other job titles, like “UI designer” (10%), “web designer” (5%), and “graphic designer” (3%). There’s a lot less surprise as far as design tooling goes, with Figma vastly leading the pack (64%), followed by Sketch (12%). That said, it’s a little surprising to me that Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop combine for a minuscule 3%.

Postman 2021 State of the API Report

What it is: A survey of more than 28,000 developers (up from 13,500!) that measures who is developing with APIs, what sort of work they’re doing with them, and how APIs are evolving.

What it found: Postman users made 855 million API requests in the past year, which is up a massive 56%. And the trend should continue—67% of developers say they’ve adopted an API-first philosophy and 94% say they believe their companies will either invest more or the same in APIs in the next year. We’ll see when those results roll in next year!

Chrome 2021 Scroll Survey Report

What it is: A survey of 880 anonymous submissions commissioned by the Chrome team about the state of scrolling on the web. Of those submissions, 336 completed every answer. The questions were drawn from a 2019 MDN Web DNA Report that outlines the most commonly reported issues related to scrolling.

What it found: Chris actually covered this back in September and noted that nearly half of surveyed developers are dissatisfied with scrolling on the web. He somewhat lumped himself in that group noting that smooth scrolling leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to development, and how scroll snapping seems to attract the occasional browser bug.

Choice open-ended answer: “Scrolljacking should be considered a crime.”

Sparkbox 2021 Design Systems Survey

What it is: Looks like this survey slipped under our radar last year because this is Sparkbox’s fourth edition looking at design systems, zeroing in on adoption, contributions, design and technical debt, and how organizations use design systems. This year’s results reflect the answers of 376 submissions.

What it found: Roughly 40% of folks consider their design system either successful (31%) or “very” successful (8%). When it comes to design system adoption, 57% said it was an individual who brought the idea of a design system to their organization, whereas 22% said it was leadership, and 3% said it came from a third-party recommendation. Interestingly enough, encouraging adoption is the top priority of those surveyed, but overcoming design and technical debt is the top challenge.

Tower Git Mac Dev Survey 2021

What it is: A survey of 4,072 developers working on the MacOS platform with the goal of understanding the profile of this specific developer niche. And while it means nothing, I hereby crown this the most gorgeous report of the bunch. 🏆

What it found: A majority of those surveyed (54.8%) fall somewhere in the 30-44 age group, most of those (39%) are between 30-39. If this sample group is truly reflective of the Mac developer community, then it looks as though Mac development itself is on the rise with 48.8% bringing fewer than 10 years of experience into the job. (5.1% are OGs with 30+ years of experience.) Other than that, most developers say they write JavaScript the most (54.6%) while Swift is the top language (28.8%) they want to learn. And hey, CSS-Tricks is noted as a top learning resource! The feeling is mutual, as the Tower team wrote our recent Advanced Git series.

HackerEarth 2021 Developer Survey

What it is: Another one we missed last year! HackerEarth’s second annual survey polls 25,431 developers across 171 countries, asking participants about their skills, workplace, learning methods, and tooling.

What it found: First off, I love that this survey has a section purely about student developers because it reveals what they’re interested in, including artificial intelligence (16.3%), general information technology (13.8%), data science (11.8%), and the Internet of Things (9%). Blockchain (4.7%) makes an appearance in there as well. An overwhelming majority (81.8%) start to learn coding between ages 15-21. The results also show a lot of interest in TypeScript, that Zoom fatigue is real, LinkedIn is leading way to find work, and that many (22%) take walks as a way to unwind (compared to 5.3% who either can’t or don’t take breaks at all). Interesting stuff!

Trend Micro 2021 Midyear Cybersecurity Report

What it is: An analysis of threats and risks on the web for the first six months of 2021. Unless I missed it somewhere, there isn’t a whole lot of detail on the methodology used here, but I suspect there’s scanning involved since the data shows that 7.3 million ransomware threads were detected.

What it found: That 7.3 million figure sounds BIG (and it is), but it also represents about half of what was detected in the first six months of 2020. It’s worth poking at this because it identifies a number of prominent attacks, most of which I was totally oblivious to. It’s crazy how sophisticated attacks have become—to the extent where one ransomware attack left half of the U.S. East Coast without fuel for a spell this year.

WordPress 2020 Annual Survey Results

What it is: I think this is the only instance of a survey in this list that calls itself a “2020” survey because that’s when the data was collected—rather than 2021, the year it was published. 17,295 WordPress professionals and users submitted answers to questions that dig into how they use and work with WordPress.

What it found: Kudos to WordPress (disclaimer: they’re a sponsor of this site!) for not sugarcoating the fact that the data shows clear frustrations with some features, and that its Net Promoter Score (NPS, which is metric for customer loyalty) has hit an all-time low (41% are either passive customers or detractors). 59% say they use WordPress because “it is what I know best” which might be a little concerning as the platform wades deeper into the no-code waters of blocks and full-site editing capabilities—new terrain for most WordPress developers and users.

There’s so much data in here, from site customization trends, to how comfortable developers are writing JavaScript and PHP, to working with React, to level of WordPress experience, to the most used plugins, to… well, there’s just a lot.

An Informal Survey of Web Performance Tooling in 2021

What it is: Sia Karamalegos opened a survey to learn more about the web performance tooling folks are using to make sites fast. It’s a small sample size of 36 people, but still interesting nonetheless.

What it found: WebPageTest and Chrome’s DevTools came in tied for most used performance tooling. Funny enough, second place was also a tie, but between PageSpeed Insights and simply spinning up a plain ol’ browser with JavaScript disabled. That’s what people say they use, but there’s also a similar question that asks what performance tools they want to use. Boomerang, Lighthouse Treemap, and Sitespeed.io top that list.

Wrapping up…

Well, that does it for another year of rounding up research! I know it probably goes without saying, but this is all just for fun. Very few of the surveys followed a scientific method and many of the sample sizes are too small to be a true, proven reflection of reality. But what fun it is to grok the results and put them up against our personal assumptions!

Know of a report I missed? Let me know and I’ll try to work it in. 🤠


2021 Roundup of Web Research originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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State of JavaScript 2020 https://css-tricks.com/state-of-javascript-2020/ https://css-tricks.com/state-of-javascript-2020/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2021 15:40:32 +0000 https://css-tricks.com/?p=332973 We rounded up a bunch of published 2020 annual reports right before the year ended and compiled them into a big ol’ list. The end of the list called out a couple of in-progress surveys, one of which was …


State of JavaScript 2020 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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We rounded up a bunch of published 2020 annual reports right before the year ended and compiled them into a big ol’ list. The end of the list called out a couple of in-progress surveys, one of which was the 2020 State of JavaScript. Well, the results are in and available to check out!

Just shy of 24,000 folks participated in this year’s survey… almost exactly 2,000 more than 2019.

I love charts like this:

Notice how quickly some technologies take off then start to gain negative opinions, even as the rate of adoption increases.

What I like about this particular survey (and the State of CSS) is how the data is readily available to export in addition to all the great and telling charts. That opens up the possibility of creating your own reports and gleaning your own insights. But here’s what I’ve found interesting in the short time I’ve spent looking at it:

  • React’s facing negative opinions. It’s not so much that everybody’s fleeing from it, but the “shiny” factor may be waning (coming in at 88% satisfaction versus a 93% peak in 2017). Is that because it suffers from the same frustration that devs expressed with a lack of documentation in other surveys? I don’t know, but the fact that we see both growth and a sway toward negative opinions is interesting enough that I’ll want to see where it goes in 2021.
  • Awwwww, Gulp, what happened?! Wow, what a change in perception. Its usage has dipped a bit, but the impression of it is now solidly in “negative opinions” territory. I still use it personally on a number of projects and it does exactly what I need, but I get that there are better build processes these days that don’t require writing a bunch of pipes and whatnot.
  • Hello, Svelte. It’s the most fourth most used framework (15%) but enjoys the highest level of satisfaction (89%). I’m already interested in giving it a go, but this makes me want to dive into it even more — which is consistent with the fact that it also garners the most interest of all frameworks (68%).
  • Javascript is sorta overused and sorta overly complex. Well, according to the polls. It’s just so interesting that the distribution between the opinions is almost perfectly even. At the same time, the vast majority of folks (80.6%) believe JavaScript is heading in the right direction.

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2020 Roundup of Web Research https://css-tricks.com/2020-roundup-of-web-research/ https://css-tricks.com/2020-roundup-of-web-research/#comments Mon, 21 Dec 2020 23:02:46 +0000 https://css-tricks.com/?p=331113 It’s December! Lots of things are published this time of year, like developer advent calendars and organizations reflecting on the past year. We have even our own end-of-year series where we asked folks what they learned in 2020. But we …


2020 Roundup of Web Research originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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It’s December! Lots of things are published this time of year, like developer advent calendars and organizations reflecting on the past year. We have even our own end-of-year series where we asked folks what they learned in 2020. But we also see lots of research come out around this time. Some of it we’ve already linked up. But let’s round up what we’ve seen so far.

2020 MDN Web Developer Needs Assessment

What it is: An annual, global survey that researches developer needs and how to address them. It surveys 30 stakeholders representing board member organizations including browser vendors, the W3C, and industry experts.

What it found: Chris Mills summarized the survey’s findings. This the second edition of the annual survey, and this year’s results show that the list of top developer needs hasn’t changed much year-over-year. Things like outdated documentation, cross-browser support, and keeping current with a constantly changing landscape headline the feedback. But it’s worth looking at the raw data because they’re so much of it!

HTTP Archive’s annual state of the web report

Source: HTTP Archive

What it is: A study that looks at 7.5 million websites and analyzes how they were made, breaking things up into sections including page content, user experience, content publishing and content distribution.

What it found: Robin summarized his highlights, which include CSS gaining more page weight, and that the average site contains three <style> elements as well as six remote stylesheets. That’s just the tip of the CSS iceberg though, because there’s a whole lot more data just on that, not to mention sections on JavaScript and markup.

State of CSS 2020

What it is: An annual look at CSS, surveying developers on the features they use, as well as their understanding of and satisfaction with them. Survey co-founder Sacha Greif rounded up his own findings last year, which was the first year of results.

What it found: Tailwind CSS is getting popular! calc() is in the mainstream! position: sticky; is being used more in layouts! Grid is being used roughly 20% more than last year! It’s way too easy and fun to geek out on this stuff.

GitHub’s 2020 State of the Octoverse

What it is: This is sort of GitHub’s internal review of activity, providing status on the number of users, repos, languages, and whatnot. But those numbers sort of reveal interesting things about our work-life balance, communities, and general activity.

What it found: It’s neat to see 60+ million new repos and 1.9 billion contributions in the past year, but the insights that arise from developer activities on GitHub are the most interesting thing in this report. For example, GitHub saw a huge spike in activity in February and March as the Covid pandemic became widespread, with developers putting in more time and working longer hours — possibly a sign that more side projects were born. They also reported a decrease in work activity on weekends, while seeing a rise in open source activity — again, possibly pointing to side projects.

What it is: A report that the search giant releases each year highlighting top search terms, breaking them down into categories, including News, People, Actors, Definitions, Recipes, and more.

What it found: Sure, this report isn’t directly related to front-end development, but it’s sort of nice to be in touch with the zeitgeist of such an odd year. The video that accompanies the report sorta views like a Google commercial, but it’s still a good look back at what people cared about most (or most often?) in the year — sorta like a high school yearbook.

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020

What it is: A survey of 65,000 developers that looks at the technologies they use and how they use them.

What it found: TypeScript surpassed Python as the second most beloved language after Rust. Roughly 90% of respondents say they visit Stack Overflow when they’re stuck on something (which seems right for a Stack Overflow survey). More than 15% of folks say Stack Overflow is more welcoming this year compared to last year, which is an interesting metric. Lots more is in there, of course!

Angular Developer Survey 2020

What it is: A survey of 30,000 developers about their experience with the framework.

What it found: This report was interesting to me, not because I use Angular on lots of projects (I don’t), but because the folks who responded indicated better documentation as a top need, which seems to follow the HTTP Archive’s annual state of the web report.

JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem 2020

What it is: A survey of nearly 20,000 developers by JetBrains, maker of the popular PhpStorm IDE.

What it found: They state the key findings up front. JavaScript is the most widely used programming language, Python is the most studied, and websites are the most common type of app that people are building.

The WebAIM Million 2020

What it is: An evaluation of the accessibility of the top 1 million and over 100,000 additional interior pages. What are those top million sites? They include ones from the Majestic Millions list with additional page analysis coming from the Open PageRank Initiative and Alexa Top Sites.

What it found: The report literally uses the word “dismal” to describe the results. And the report only analyzes detectable accessibility issues — there’s no qualitative assessment, which would certainly reveal more insights. The study detected 60,909,278 errors, or roughly 60.9 errors per page. Yikes. Brushing up on the data and its findings is a good idea so we can all help improve that bleak picture.

CodinGame 2020 Developer Survey

What it is: A survey of 20,000 developers, covering learning, skills, languages, and demographics.

What it found: This report measures a lot of the same stuff as other surveys in this compilation, but it also has a “Work & Happiness” section that’s super interesting. For example, developers tend to be happier with their jobs if they have either a PhD or no formal education at all — all other forms of education fall flat after that. Also, developers in the U.K. (7.4), Canada (7.38), and the U.S. (7.33) report the highest levels of work satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10. Developers who work in the manufacturing, aerospace, and finance sectors tends to be least happy.

LinkedIn 2020 Workplace Learning Report

What it is: A voluntary survey of 6,607 working professionals that evaluates their career priorities, challenges, and motivations.

What it found: Again, not exactly a web-focused study, but it found that folks rated “mobile coding and development,” “engineering and coding” and “cloud computing” as the lowest priority skills across all industries. The fact that LinkedIn Learning has a deep library of material and the ability to track the things people are watching and learning makes this feel pertinent. But maybe it’s nothing. Either way, those results gave me a little pause.

HackerRank Developer Skills Report

What it is: Insights on developer skills based on feedback from 116,648 developers — exactly what it says on the tin.

What it found: There’s some interesting stuff in here, like results on what coding language people first learned to write. But it’s the finding that “full-stack” developers are this year’s “most in-demand talent pool” that catches my eye. We talk a lot about what it means to be “full-stack” in this industry, and given the ongoing murkiness of the term, I’m just not sure what not means when 38% percent of hiring managers cited it as their top priority.

Microsoft IoT Signals Report

What it is: A study on the growth, evolvement and use of the Internet of Things, a term used to describe physical objects taking on Internet capabilities, say a watch, lightbulb, refrigerator, or whatever. The study polled about 3,000 people with a 20-minute online survey.

What it found: This report is kinda fun because it tracks the IoT customer lifecycle, from learning and trying to purchasing and using. This study found that 91% of companies are adopting or using and producing IoT products, compared to 85% in 2019. The report also sheds light on the emerging use of AI and Edge Computing, including some considerations and implications for using them.

Developer Economics Survey

What it is: You know, they seem to do lots of surveys — like two a year — then break those out into several individual reports. It looks like 30,000 developers participated recently and they glean insights about developer trends and tools.

What it found: To be honest, I didn’t look. You’ve gotta be a member of the community just to get in, and even then, it’s more of a push to take the survey than actually view the results. Whatever. Maybe the findings are awesome and you feel like going through the process.

UpWork’s Freelance Forward 2020

What it is: The very first survey by UpWork to check on the current state of freelancing, including the effect Covid has had on it, and what we might be able to expect in the future.

What it found: Out of 59 million freelancers (across all industries), 10% paused work as a result of the global pandemic, where 61% of those still freelancing have the amount of work they want or more. The report also concluded that freelancers are actually better equipped to weather the pandemic than non-freelancers. As a freelancer myself, this not only resonates with me personally but rings true with my own experience this year.

UXTools.co 2020 design tools survey

What it is: Taylor Palmer personally surveyed more than 4,000 designers to find out what sort of tools they’re this year to bridge the physical gaps left by the rise of working from home.

What it found: Some obvious things of course, like Zoom and Slack. But the report breaks things down into categories, showing the top tools for certain work. Like, whoa, Figma sure is a big player for everything from user flows to UI design. I knew it was big (and I use it myself) but I still figured other tools were bigger, especially for Mac. It pretty much dominated every category measured by this survey, even which tools designers are most excited to use or try.

Postman’s 2020 State of the API Report

What it is: A survey of 13,500 developers that measures who is developing with APIs, what sort of work they’re doing with them, and how APIs are evolving.

What it found: Basically, the state of API usage is super duper strong. I had a hunch that was the case without looking at the report and I’d bet my bologna sandwich that you did too. It also found that 70% of developers consider documentation to be one of the top four criteria for adopting a particular API, which goes back to MDN’s findings. Documentation is a big need!

Ionic Framework 2020 Developer Survey

What it is: Ionic polled it’s own customer base to get insights on how the developers who use the framework (1) actually use the framework, and (2) what sorts of things are important to them and the way they work.

What it found: Well, it confirmed Angular’s own report that Angular grew year-over-year and is the most popular app framework — it’s interesting to see just how much it’s used compared to newer frameworks, like React and Vue, both of which saw near identical growth and usage according to this survey. It’s the newer things that get talked about most, right?

Mailchimp’s 2020 Annual Report

What it is: A look at the company’s stats for the year.

What it found: Well, this is all data related directly to Mailchimp and its customers. But still cool to see numbers like 33,635,013,935 emails sent by customers, and that $314,646,819 was generated from automated abandoned cart emails. Oh, and 😍 was the most popular emoji used in email subject lines. Now you know.

Campaign Monitor’s Ultimate Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2020

Image credit: Campaign Monitor

What it is: Campaign Monitor’s updated benchmarks for email marketing, based on an analysis of 30 billion emails sent in 2019.

What it found: Tuesdays have the highest email open rates, but the highest unsubscribe rate as well. It also found that open rates declined across all industries (13.9% vs. 14.9%). In short, email benchmarks are largely the same.


Wrapping up

Phew, quite a list! But even so, there are many, many other reports out there. In fact, if you know of any not covered here, please leave a comment so we can link ’em up.

And there are more reports to come! You can actually participate in the 2020 State of JavaScript survey and the 2020 WordPress Annual Survey now, or at least at the time of this writing.


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HTTP Archive’s Annual State of the Web Report https://css-tricks.com/http-archives-annual-state-of-the-web-report/ https://css-tricks.com/http-archives-annual-state-of-the-web-report/#respond Mon, 14 Dec 2020 15:38:09 +0000 https://css-tricks.com/?p=330798 The HTTP Archive looked at more than 7 million websites and compiled their annual report detailing how the sites were built. And there’s an enormous wealth of information about how the web changed in 2020. In fact, this report is …


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The HTTP Archive looked at more than 7 million websites and compiled their annual report detailing how the sites were built. And there’s an enormous wealth of information about how the web changed in 2020. In fact, this report is more like an enormous book and it’s entirely fabulous. The data comes from making queries to the HTTP Archive and is broken down into various sections, such as Performance, Security, and the languages themselves, including how folks wrote HTML or CSS.

Here’s what the report has to say about the CSS they scanned:

While JavaScript far surpasses CSS in its share of page weight, CSS has certainly grown in size over the years, with the median desktop page loading 62 KB of CSS code, and 1 in 10 pages loading more than 240 KB of CSS code. Mobile pages do use slightly less CSS code across all percentiles, but only by 4 to 7 KB. While this is definitely greater than previous years, it doesn’t come close to JavaScript’s whopping median of 444 KB and top 10% of 1.2 MB

Gasp! And here’s a shocking bit of info that shortly follows:

[…] only about 7% of pages concentrate all their CSS code in one remote stylesheet, as we are often taught to do. In fact, the median page contains 3 <style> elements and 6 (!) remote stylesheets, with 10% of them carrying over 14 <style> elements and over 20 remote CSS files! While this is suboptimal on desktop, it really kills performance on mobile, where round-trip latency is more important than raw download speed.

I sort of want to quote the whole section about CSS specifically because there’s a lot of interesting facts that show how we, as a community, have a lot of work to do to improve performance and spread the good word about CSS optimization.

To Shared LinkPermalink on CSS-Tricks


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Highlights of the HTTP Archive Web Almanac https://css-tricks.com/highlights-of-the-http-archive-web-almanac/ Mon, 23 Dec 2019 17:07:42 +0000 https://css-tricks.com/?p=300806 I recently looked at the CSS chapter of the Web Alamanc and had some thoughts. Here, Stefan Judis looks at the whole thing and rounds up the most interesting bits to him. Here are most of them:

  • 20% of sites


Highlights of the HTTP Archive Web Almanac originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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I recently looked at the CSS chapter of the Web Alamanc and had some thoughts. Here, Stefan Judis looks at the whole thing and rounds up the most interesting bits to him. Here are most of them:

  • 20% of sites don’t compress their JavaScript.
  • React is on 5% of sites while jQuery is on 85% of sites. (Hence my tongue-in-cheek Tweet)
  • Native JavaScript imports are under 1% (we’re all still bundling, which for the time being, we’re told is the way to go).
  • Flexbox usage is at 50% and grid only 2%. (I previously remarked at how wild I think this is, with browser support being not terribly different and grid being, IMO, generally more useful.)
  • 20% of sites use responsive images. (Interesting as WordPress does it out of the box, and powers some 34% of the web. Maybe a lot of really old outdated WordPress versions out there?)
  • font-display usage is at 26%, which blows me away as it’s fairly new and a little esoteric (as much as I love it).
  • HTTPS at 80%. Also surprising considering what a pain in the butt it is if your host doesn’t make it a default part of their offering.
  • 4 of 5 sites ship with color contrast issues. Not suprising, but I wonder how many false positives are in here. I’ve seen a lot of that with automated tooling.
  • 1 of 4 sites don’t specify a lang attribute.
  • 4 of 5 forms don’t ship with labels for their input elements. WHATTTTTT.
  • 0.44% sites use a service worker. I’m a fan, but they are (1) too hard and (2) feel too dangerous to dabble in.
  • 2 of 3 pages have a huge content shift while loading. (Remember to put width and height attributes on images now, which prevents content shifting. Huge.)
  • We hear about WordPress powering 1/3 of the web, but another interesting related stat is that if you’re using a CMS, there is a 75% chance it’s WordPress.
  • Only 20% of sites use a CDN (for the HTML). I’m sure it’s higher for assets.
  • We’re still pushing around a 2MB average page size. Everything depends, but if we’re trying to be consious people in general, let’s say we aim for half that.

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300806
Thoughts After Looking at the Web Almanac’s Chapter on CSS https://css-tricks.com/thoughts-after-looking-at-the-web-almanacs-chapter-on-css/ https://css-tricks.com/thoughts-after-looking-at-the-web-almanacs-chapter-on-css/#comments Wed, 13 Nov 2019 15:20:59 +0000 https://css-tricks.com/?p=298732 Woah, I didn’t see this coming! The HTTP Archive dropped this big “state of the web” report called Web Almanac with guest writers exploring data from 5.8 million websites.

Una Kravetz and Adam Argyle wrote the CSS chapter. The …


Thoughts After Looking at the Web Almanac’s Chapter on CSS originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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Woah, I didn’t see this coming! The HTTP Archive dropped this big “state of the web” report called Web Almanac with guest writers exploring data from 5.8 million websites.

Una Kravetz and Adam Argyle wrote the CSS chapter. The point is to squeeze a digestible amount of insight out of a mountain’s worth of data. So there is some irony here with me squeezing in my thoughts about this chapter for an even quicker read, but hey, here we go.

  • 83% of sites make use of rgba() but only 22% use rgb(). That entirely makes sense to me, as rgb() isn’t a particularly useful color format, if you ask me. It’s the “a” (alpha) that gives the format the ability control transparency, which is only recently available in the most popular format, Hex, in the form of 8-Digit Hex Codes. But even then, it isn’t as nice as rgba(). hsla() is arguably the nicest color format.
  • Definitely not surprising that white and black are the two most popular named colors. I use them, by name, a lot. I even change CSS commits to use white instead of #FFF and black instead of #000 because I think there is less mental overhead to it.
  • em is twice as popular as rem. Wow. I’m a rem guy myself, just because I find it less finicky and more predictable. In theory, I still like the idea of px at the Root, rem for Components, and em for Text Elements, but I’m not sure I’ve ever pulled it off that cleanly.
  • Classes are by far the leader in selector types. Factoring how many are used, they have over a 10x lead over anything else. I like to see that. They have a low-but-not-too-low specificity value. They have nice APIs for manipulating them. Their entire purpose is to be a styling hook. They are element-agnostic. It’s just the right way to do styling. The flatter you keep styles, the less headaches you’ll have., A little more surprisingly to me is the fact that the average number of classes per element is one. Makes me really wanna know the decimal though. Was it 1.1? 1.4? 1.00001?
  • Holy buckets. Flexbox on half of sites and grid only on two percent?! The browser support isn’t that different. I’m well aware they are both very useful and can be used together and are for different things, but I find grid generally more useful and personally use it more often than flexbox.
  • I would have guessed the median number of loaded fonts on a site to average to 0, but it’s 3! I think of CSS-Tricks as having one (which is Rubik at time of writing and used only for titles. The body font of this site is system-ui.) But really, it’s 4, because of preloading and subsetting and bold versus regular and such. I wonder when variable fonts will start having an impact. I would think it would lower this number over time. Open Sans and Roboto are triple any other loaded font, and the whole list is Google Font stuff, other than some instances of Font Awesome.
  • It’s funny how some major libraries can skew stats at such a global/universal scale for their use of certain features. I remember how YouTube’s play button used to “morph” into a pause button using an SVG technology called SMIL. But because YouTube is so huge, it could look like a very high percentage of internet traffic includes SMIL, when it’s really just one button on one site. filter is in that report. While filters are cool, it’s really the fact that it happens to be within YouTube embeds and Font Awesome’s stylesheet that the percentage of sites using it (78%) looks astonishingly high.
  • Of pages that make super heavy use of transitions and animations, transitions are about twice as heavily used, but, transitions are used six times more at the 50th percentile. That feels about right to me. Transitions are generally more useful, but the more animation you are doing, the more you reach for advanced tools like keyframes.
  • Looks like most websites have approximately 45 media queries on them. It’s not totally clear if those are different media queries, or if they could be the same media queries repeated elsewhere in the stylesheet. That seems like a lot if they are all different, so I suspect it’s just a tooling thing where people use nested media queries for authoring clarity and they bubble out but don’t get combined because that’s too weird with specificity. I’d be interested to see how many unique media queries people use. The most fascinating thing to me about the media query data is that min-width and max-width are neck-and-neck in usage. I would have put max-width far ahead if I was guessing.
  • About six stylesheets per site. It’s probably too hard to tell because assets like this are so often hosted on CDNs, but I’d love to know how many are hand-authored for the site, and how many are from third parties. Is the distribution like three and three or like one and five?

There is a lot more in the report, and CSS is just one of twenty chapters. So go digging!


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The Average Web Page (Data from Analyzing 8 Million Websites) https://css-tricks.com/average-web-page-data-analyzing-8-million-websites/ https://css-tricks.com/average-web-page-data-analyzing-8-million-websites/#comments Mon, 15 Aug 2016 13:23:07 +0000 http://css-tricks.com/?p=244360 The following is a guest post by Catalin Rosu, who along with some colleagues, dug up a ton of data about the HTML content of web sites. This is the most recent study of its kind and wildly fascinating


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The following is a guest post by Catalin Rosu, who along with some colleagues, dug up a ton of data about the HTML content of web sites. This is the most recent study of its kind and wildly fascinating to see the results. I find it especially fun to compare the top results to what I would have guessed would have won.

We’ve all been there. We try to improve our HTML code making it clean, beautiful, and readable. We do this in pursuit of better semantics and better accessibility, so that everyone can use it. It’s our top priority. And we always have questions:

  • What is the best way to structure the markup?
  • How are others doing it?

Questions like these were running through my mind. I wondered about how people write markup these days, as new web technologies emerge. So, I teamed up with a few of my colleagues at AWRCloud and we came up with a data set of over 8 million pages from Google top twenty results.

The studies that came before this one

Back in 2005, Ian Hickson, the editor of HTML5 specification, made an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, looking to see what the web is made of. A billion is an enormous number, but to Google, nothing is impossible. With this huge amount of documents, he extracted valuable information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. The outstanding results were later published as Web Authoring Statistics, which is still the most powerful web authoring study ever made.

More recently, in 2008, the Opera Metadata Analysis and Mining Application crawler, MAMA, ended up analyzing about 3.5 million URLs. Brian Wilson, the author of this impressive work, expanded the study by publishing results detailing page structures, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

One of the analyses from Web Authoring Statistics that later proved vital for the work in progress HTML5 development, was a list of the most popular class names in those HTML documents. The Opera MAMA crawler also searched for the most common class names and in addition to Google’s results and they’ve published relevant results on the popular ID attribute values given to elements as well.

What does this study add to the conversation?

The data for this study comes from 8,021,323 index pages gathered from the top twenty Google results for about 30 million keywords, chosen by keyword volume. Meaning: we had 30 million keywords. We ran a Google search for each of them and took the URLs for the top 20 results and added them to the list and removed the duplicates.

We can only assume that the relevance of these web pages to the general web population is very high. That is based on the likelihood these are popular and high-trafficked websites commensurate to their search result positions.

How fresh is this data?

The latest data set is from May 20th, 2016.

This new study will never surpass the former study Google made back in 2005. It’s not about overcoming Opera’s great study either. It’s about finding new and relevant insights on the actual markup used by the most popular and successful web pages on the internet.

So, how does the average HTML page look like nowadays? Take a look at the screenshots below and check out the study for the full statistics.

The Stats

Following our study, we find that the average website index page uses twenty six different different element types.

Most website use 26 different HTML elements, give or take a few, with a curious peak at 9.

The twenty six elements used on the most pages, ordered by frequency:

Unsurprisingly, <head> and <html> are used on all sites. Slightly surprising with <body> at 99% – perhaps a very large website with a weird mistake? The table elements at the bottom of the list are still on a surprising nearly-third of all websites.

Among the document type declarations that specify which version of (X)HTML a page is using, the latest HTML5 doctype is clearly leading the way.

Nearly two thirds of all websites declare themselves at HTML5.

If we look at all the elements that are specifically about telling browser or search engines about the site and how to style it, we found about 175 million elements, and here’s how they broke down:

The breakdown of the 105 million elements for content sectioning looks like this:

<h3>s are the most popular heading elements and overall content sectioning element.

Of the billion text content elements:

The <div> has a commanding lead.

What’s the future of web?

Us web developers and web content creators are curious and interested in usage, statistics, and browser support. These are the things that led to the class names findings back in 2005, names known today as the most popular HTML5 tags.

The web is evolving fast. This isn’t new, but it can feel overwhelming. The trends are changing from year to year and as a web content creator, it requires motivation and effort to stay up to date. Think about how the markup and the average web page looked like ten years ago and how a modern web page looks like today.

We also used the study to look at emerging technologies like Web Components. While Web Components allows authors to create arbitrarily named elements, we can look for standards elements used in the creation of Web Components.

Nobody can predict the future. We can only guess how the average web page will look like ten years from now on. Next time we run this study (we’re considering quarterly), will we see things like Web Components rise?

And again, the complete data set is here.


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