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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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Final Thoughts on the State of the Web Survey

Over the summer we ran a community survey called State of the Web. We asked developers, web and otherwise, to weigh in on their thoughts on the the web as a platform for users and developers. The World Wide Web is one of the most ubiquitous platforms ever created and will remain critical to computing for any foreseeable future. It is a technology that evolves quickly and is a topic that needs regular visits. That's an understatement.

Despite the web’s importance, it is far from a perfect platform. With needs of balancing compatibility, innovation, and standards development, the web can often seem like a chaotic mess. Silicon Valley browser giants each have their own motivations for feature development, while developers and users across the world all have their own needs. Somehow we make this resilient platform work.

Our survey of 2,000 developers helped us find out that CSS flex-box has indeed reached critical use among developers, disabling JavaScript on the web remains a heated debate, and that dog people are more disciplined developers than cat people. That last one seems pretty clear in the corollary data, try and prove it wrong!

Here are a few posts relating to the survey you might want to check out. There were many analyses and discussions though, if you know of a good one I didn’t list, feel free to leave it in the comments.











The DEV Survey on BigQuery

State Of The Web Data from Dev.to

GitHub logo MartyHimmel / DEV-state-of-the-web-2018

dev.to "State of the Web" survey results

A quick and dirty visualization of the results from dev.to's "State of the Web" survey.

View results

The surveyresults.csv file has the original data from the Call for Analysis post.

results.json includes a cleaned up version to make it easier to use with Google Charts. Answers of "(blank)" and "" were removed and duplicate questions (multiple choice questions - the results were stored in multiple columns in the CSV) were merged. The parser script handles most of it, with the exception of merging the questions and their respective answer arrays.








For a deeper dive, here is an Excel file or CSV of the raw data from the survey.

We rely on the web every day, and each bit of data helps when we make choices. Please user these results to inform some of your choices or win a debate on your web development team.

Happy coding!

Top comments (1)

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cvshealths72406 profile image
cvshealthsurveyblog • Edited

It's really a great analysis, thanks for sharing CVSHealthSurvey