What the 2024 State of CSS Survey Tells Us
The 2024 State of CSS survey results are out, offering the usual snapshot of the front-end landscape. While surveys warrant a dose of skepticism, the annual report provides some compelling insights into demographics, feature adoption, and tooling trends.
Who Is Answering the Survey
The demographic data paints a fairly specific picture of the typical respondent. Unsurprisingly, Western developers with high salaries are heavily represented, with the United States leading in reported income. Alongside that, gender and regional pay gaps remain stubbornly consistent, with male respondents reporting significantly higher compensation than their female counterparts.
More intriguing is the experience breakdown. A massive 44% of respondents have been developing for under a decade.
It’s worth remembering that someone with 10 years of experience entered the field around 2014, just as Flexbox was landing and years after the initial CSS3/HTML5 wave. A near-majority of developers, therefore, never wrestled with table layouts, clearfix hacks, or spacer images. This signals a generational shift in how the web is built and learned.
Feature Adoption: The Long Tail Is Interesting
Interpreting the feature usage data is tricky—reducing the vast CSS landscape to 50 entries inevitably raises questions about methodology. Is filter really the most-used CSS feature? Regardless, the survey results consistently draw attention to what’s underused versus what’s merely underexplored.
For example, hanging-punctuation ranks dead last in actual usage at 1.57% despite half of all respondents placing it on their reading list. Anchor Positioning, with a current usage of 4.8%, is expected to gain traction now that Chromium offers support and a wave of tutorials have hit the web.
Cascade Layers sit at a robust 18.7% usage, a figure that suggests its elegant design is making the CSS Cascade easier to manage for many. @scope lingers at 4.8%, but the general sentiment toward how the Cascade is managed may see a marked uptick as these features mature. Also notable is the position of viewport units, which rank 11th in general feature usage but 2nd among those with the most layout experience—a discrepancy that spawns more questions than answers.
The Shift Away From Frameworks
Tailwind overtaking Bootstrap as the leading CSS framework surprises no one this year. More telling, however, is the broader trend beyond the top contenders. The “No CSS framework” option ranked at number 13, earning 46 votes. While that total is dwarfed by Bootstrap’s or Tailwind’s, the mere presence of a “no framework” option on the list shows how far native CSS capabilities have come in recent years.
This sentiment extends to pre/post-processors, where 19% of respondents reported using none at all. Sass still dominates at 67%, with PostCSS at 38%, but "None" outpaces Less, Stylus, and Lightning CSS as the third most common response.
Testing and the Great Divide
One of the more eyebrow-raising results this year is testing habits: only 67% say they test their work on mobile devices, despite 99% reporting they test on desktops. Whether that gap reflects a reliance on responsive design mode or a genuine oversight remains an open question.
The "Great Divide" appears as wide as ever. According to the report, 53% of developers write more JavaScript than CSS in their day-to-day work, reinforcing the notion that many front-end roles are now heavily weighted toward logic rather than styling.
The Wishlist: Progress on All Fronts
For years, Mixins, Conditional Logic, and Masonry have topped the "missing CSS features" list. This year’s survey shows movement on all three:
- A new draft for the CSS Functions and Mixins Module was published in late June, following the CSSWG’s decision to adopt the proposal earlier in the year.
- The CSSWG has resolved to add an
if()conditional to the CSS Values Module Level 5 specification. - Competing proposals for CSS masonry syntax have emerged, with Apple and Chrome staking out differing positions on how to approach the issue within CSS Grid specifications.
Resources and Community Tastes
When it comes to where developers get their CSS news, a few names dominate. CSS-Tricks maintained its top position among blogs followed by respondents.
Smashing Magazine rose from fifth to second place this year, while Kevin Powell and Josh Comeau having secured spots in the Top 10 speaks to their skill in making the subject approachable and engaging. The rankings capture a community of educators who are helping developers fall in love with CSS again, one resource at a time.
The broader takeaway from the community, beyond the rankings, is a renewed interest in personal blogging and RSS feeds. More front-enders are publishing on their own sites, and webrings and guestbooks are experiencing a small revival—a healthy shift in an era dominated by centralized social platforms.
The full credit for this annual effort goes to Sacha Greif and the Devographics team. Their work in gathering, analyzing, and visualizing this data provides a valuable annual check-in on the state of the web’s styling language.
