The State of CSS 2019

I've been a fan of and a user of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) since its introduction in the 1990s. I gave a presentation to the developers at Dow Jones Markets about HTML and CSS around 1997. In my last job at the Toronto Stock Exchange, I had to dive into the intricacies of SASS (Syntactically awesome style sheets) after Quadralay's WebWorks ePublisher adopted the technology (That was the most fun I had in my last year there.) But I certainly wouldn't call myself an expert CSS developer and there are many areas of modern CSS that I know nothing about.

So I was interested to take a browse through The State of CSS 2019 report, based on a survey of over 10,000 developers. It's both eye catching (using the latest features of CSS, if somewhat garish), interactive, and informative.

In the web development family, JavaScript has developed a bit of a reputation as the angry, rebellious teenager going through a new phase every year and telling you you're just too old to understand. CSS on the other hand has always been the studious, well-behaved kid who always stays polite and never makes a rash decision.

But don't take things for granted: despite being over 20 years old, there's signs that CSS might be going through the same tumultuous teenage years that JavaScript just went through. Flexbox! Grid! CSS-in-JS! In 2019, CSS is finally dyeing its hair pink and getting a tattoo just like it's always secretly wanted.

Parenting books won't help much with this one, but that's where we come in: we've surveyed over 10,000 developers in this first ever State of CSS survey. So join us to find out which CSS features are used the most, which tools are gaining adoption, and much more.

I need to take a closer look through this report as I need to rebuild my personal web site one of these days and I will likely use one of the major CSS framework. At the TSX I used the W3.CSS framework as it didn't need jQuery or JavaScript) but I'm leaning toward Bootstrap, which seems to be the dominant framework now.

I should give a shout out to W3Schools website, which is the best resource for web development that I've found.