Web Directions

The State of the Web 2008

Welcome to this detailed report from our first “State of the Web” sur­vey of pro­fes­sional web design­ers and devel­op­ers. It includes details and analy­sis of all the responses to over 50 ques­tions cov­er­ing tech­nolo­gies, tech­niques, philoso­phies and prac­tices that today’s web pro­fes­sion­als employ.

You can read all the ques­tions, down­load the com­plete (anonymized) set of responses, see tab­u­lar results to all the ques­tions, the ques­tions asked, or dive into our detailed analy­sis.

You might also be inter­ested in our “State of the Web” ses­sion at Web Directions North in Denver in the first week of February, where rep­re­sen­ta­tives of major browser devel­op­ers, and the W3C, will dis­cuss the state and future of the web.

Table of Contents

• Who was surveyed?
• Browsers and Operating systems
• Markup
• CSS and other Presentation technologies
• JavaScript, Ajax and the DOM
• Flash, Silverlight, and other embed­ded content
• Back end devel­op­ment lan­guages and systems
• Conclusions

About the survey

Keeping track of cur­rent web design and devel­op­ment prac­tice is far from straight­for­ward. We can sur­mise what the gen­eral con­sen­sus about best prac­tice is from arti­cles pub­lished at rec­og­nized sites and forums devoted to web devel­op­ment. But just what devel­op­ers are actu­ally doing when they develop for the web is much harder to deter­mine. Objective projects like Opera Software’s MAMA can give us a sense of the use of par­tic­u­lar tech­nolo­gies, but it’s more dif­fi­cult to deter­mine when par­tic­u­lar sites were devel­oped (and so to deter­mine how prac­tices change over time), and it’s also dif­fi­cult to con­clude from these objec­tive data the under­ly­ing prac­tices, philoso­phies and approaches adopted by devel­op­ers (for exam­ple, how impor­tant is it to them that pages look as nearly the same as pos­si­ble across all browsers).

The goal of this “state of the web” sur­vey is to try and get behind the sta­tis­tics, and get a sense of the philoso­phies and tech­niques as well as the tech­nolo­gies, that web design­ers and devel­op­ers are using today. Over time, hope­fully we’ll be able to track changes in how web pro­fes­sion­als design and develop for the web.

As men­tioned, it is a sub­jec­tive sur­vey, and those who took it are self select­ing. So, it cer­tainly won’t be rep­re­sen­ta­tive of all web design­ers and devel­op­ers. It’s def­i­nitely skewed toward early adopters and self edu­ca­tors, peo­ple who keep abreast of devel­op­ments in these fields by attend­ing con­fer­ences, read­ing pop­u­lar blogs and sites focussed on these issues and so on.

A sneak peek at some results

In short, what did the sur­vey find? Some quite sur­pris­ing results include

• just how few of the respon­dents use any form of Internet Explorer for their day to day web use (with only 3 out of over 1200 respon­dents using IE8), and sim­i­larly how few use Google Chrome as their pri­mary browser, despite the splash the launch of that browser recently
• nearly half of respon­dents use Mac OS X as their pri­mary oper­at­ing sys­tem, and only 10% use win­dows Vista
• less than a third of respon­dents test their web sites with Internet Explorer 8 (while Mobile Safari comes in at 20%, and Chrome at 40%)

There’s also a great deal of inter­est in terms of the nitty gritty of web design phi­los­o­phy and prac­tice, from the high per­cent­age of respon­dents who use JavaScript (around 95%), to the very small uptake of Silverlight (around 2% of all respon­dents) to the very high per­cent­age of data­base dri­ven sites (96%), over­whelm­ingly run on open source data­bases (over 80%).

When we first put together the sur­vey, we really weren’t cer­tain that the results would be of any great inter­est or value. But the num­ber of responses (over 1200 from all over the world), and the results them­selves def­i­nitely pro­vide both food for thought, and in many cases which we’ll dis­cuss below, cause for opti­mism that web devel­op­ment best prac­tices are becom­ing more widely adopted over time.

We’ve also made avail­able all the results from the sur­vey in CSV for­mat. There’s all kinds of cor­re­la­tions that read­ers might be inter­ested in inves­ti­gat­ing. For exam­ple it might be inter­est­ing to com­pare use of HTML in gov­ern­ment ver­sus large cor­po­ra­tions, or in the United States as opposed to Europe. If you are inter­ested, please grab the files and explore them, and let us know any­thing inter­est­ing you might find.

Now, sit back and read on for a sense of the state of the web in late 2008.