Two things:

  • The 2026 State of CSS survey results are out
  • The 2026 State of Devs survey is open

The State of CSS is obviously one I’m always stoked to see. But this year’s was especially sweet seeing CSS-Tricks come in at the third most widely used resource for web platform resources. And that’s right behind MDN and Can I Use, obvious heavyweights. How cool is it seeing a blog rank alongside the types of tools we all use every single day!

The survey sums it up nicely:

CSS-Tricksmay have found success as a blog, but its Guides and Almanac sections are wonderful resources in their own right, which makes the website’s third place here well-deserved.

Yes! We’ve put a crap ton of work into the Guides and Almanac the past couple of years. Easily more than anything else. You’ve gotta credit the likes of Juan Diego, Sunkanmi (who wrote the survey’s conclusion!), Gabriel, Declan, and Mojtaba for helping invest so much time and effort there. Real rock stars, I tell you what.

A few CSS-y things from the survey that caught my eye:

  • The number of folks using AI generation between 0% and 50% of the time outweighs anything above that, 3,031 to 721. Always have to take this with a grain of salt because it’s totally possible that the people who take the survey are way less inclined to rely on AI than those who may overwhelmingly use it (even because they have to) and don’t take the survey. Or maybe CSS developers are simply more likely to handwrite code in general.
  • People are pretty darn happy with the current state of CSS, averaging a straight 4 out of 5. That’s exactly the same as last year, .1 below 2024, and .2 above the start of data in 2020. This might mean that the recent CSS renaissance of the past few years is more exciting than overwhelming. Or maybe that’s a separate metric altogether. It’s not like CSS can’t be enjoyable and exhausting at the same time.
  • Favorite new features are all over the map. It starts with anchor positioning and :has()neck-and-neck. I don’t really think of:has()as “new” but I love that it resonates so much that it also (spoiler alert) ranked as the most used feature. I’ve gotta agree with anchor positioning. It scratches an itch that’s annoyed many of us for years and does it well, in a way that makes JavaScript practically unnecessary for tooltips. that said, CSS Color Level 4 features would easily outrank everything if they were combined.
  • Oy, the gender breakdown is as woeful as ever. I’d love to see that balance out, but it’s going to take more than what a survey can do. We need combined efforts from conferences, employers, and yes, even publications like CSS-Tricks to attract and spotlight more voices. And we could say the exact same thing about ethnicity.
  • I am getting very old.

So yeah, that’s a little roundup. High fives to Sacha Greif for always doing a bang-up job on this, not to mention all the other surveys he puts so much work into.

And now go take the State of Devs survey — all about you, nothing to do with code.