State of CSS 2026

The CSS of 2026 would be unrecognizable to our distant ancestors from the early 2000s.

Today, you can animate page transitions using CSS, create masonry layouts, even emulate a microprocessor! And of course, you can render Doom in CSS–and yes, you can now even center <div>s in CSS as well!

To help you understand how this year's State of CSS survey results reflect this vibrant ecosystem, here is a quick overview of the most interesting trends.

The Year of Anchor Positioning

Anchor Positioning's limited browser support makes it all the more remarkable that it came in first when asking respondents for their favorite new CSS feature.

Browser Support Issues

Anchor Positioning also ranked first when asking developers which CSS Features they'd like to use, but were avoiding because of browser support issues.

This points to a key issue of the CSS ecosystem: because of lagging browser support, enthusiasm for newly-announced features is often mitigated by the inability to use them in a real-world production context.

In addition to Anchor Positioning, a few other features such as View Transitions, or if() fall in that same bucket: CSS developers want these features, and it's now up to browser vendors to make sure they can be usable everywhere.

This is where initiatives such as Interop come in, and this year's edition will thankfully help improve support across the board for many of the survey's most-requested features.

Bucking the AI Trend

While the rest of the web development world has been entrusting more and more of its code to AI, CSS seems to remain a stronghold of manual coding, at least for now.

Most of the comments around this issue cited the fact that AI just isn't great at producing good CSS code yet, so it'll be interesting to see how things evolve going forward.

A Unique Language

More than any other web technology, CSS feels like its own wholly original thing, and it's been fascinating to see it evolve over decades into its modern incarnation.

This is just a tiny part of the data collected in this survey, so be sure to check out the full survey results to get the whole picture!

– Sacha Greif