State of HTML 2024

There are few things more frustrating than knowing a new browser API would solve your problem perfectly, but that you can't use it because of poor support.

Thankfully, with initiatives like Interop one can hope that the Popover API and Anchor Positioning soon join the ranks of the features we all use without giving it a second thought.

While poor browser support is certainly a problem, even well-supported features can see lower usage if they are hard to customize to developer needs, or just plain hard to master.

It might seem weird that omnipresent UI controls such as tabs or datatables still don't have a corresponding native HTML element.

But getting these complex behaviors right while accounting for all edge cases takes time, so for now all we can do is wait and hope these elements make their way to the browser one day.

We still spend far more time writing JavaScript (or TypeScript) than anything else. While there's nothing wrong with that, the web platform as a whole's ongoing progress will hopefully help balance things out a bit in the near future.

While “classic” use cases like blogs or homepages still represent a sizable part of the modern web developer's workload, the largest chunk by far is now web apps – which in turn explains why the web platform has been adapting to this new state of things.

Programming & Technical Tools topped the rankings, which makes sense for a developer-focused survey.

It's also interesting to note that E-commerce came in third, as this is a sector that faces the double challenge of building highly performant sites that also need to feature complex user interactions.