Two things:

The State of CSS is always worth paying attention to, but this year’s results were especially notable: CSS-Tricks came in third among most widely used web platform resources, right behind MDN and Can I Use.

State of CSS 2026 results chart for most used resources. CSS-Tricks is listed third.

The survey sums it up nicely:

CSS-Tricks may 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.

A lot of work has gone into the Guides and Almanac over the past couple of years — more than anything else on the site. Credit goes to contributors Juan Diego, Sunkanmi (who also wrote the survey’s conclusion), Gabriel, Declan, and Mojtaba for investing so much time and effort there.

Highlights from the Survey

  • AI-generated code usage: The number of respondents using AI generation between 0% and 50% of the time outweighs those using it more than 50%, by 3,031 to 721. This should be taken with a grain of salt — people who rely heavily on AI may be less likely to take the survey in the first place. Or CSS developers may simply be more inclined to handwrite code in general.

  • Happiness with CSS: Respondents are averaging a 4 out of 5, the same as last year, 0.1 below 2024, and 0.2 above where data started in 2020. The recent CSS renaissance appears to be more exciting than overwhelming — though CSS can certainly be both enjoyable and exhausting at the same time.

  • Favorite new features: Results are spread across the board, with anchor positioning and :has() neck-and-neck at the top. :has() also ranked as the most used feature overall. Anchor positioning deserves the recognition — it solves a longstanding pain point and makes JavaScript practically unnecessary for tooltips. CSS Color Level 4 features would likely outrank everything if they were counted together.

  • Gender and ethnicity demographics: The breakdown remains imbalanced. Addressing that will take combined efforts from conferences, employers, and publications alike — not just survey data.

State of Devs Survey Is Open

High fives to Sacha Greif for consistently putting so much work into this and the other surveys in the series. Now go take the State of Devs survey — it’s all about you as a developer, nothing to do with code.