The State of the Web survey
aka thoughts on what everybody else is doing
I have just finished reading The State of the Web survey results. I was surprised by the results of the survey of current web practices, I always considered myself an early adopter of design and development practices and technologies when it comes to HTML, CSS and the ilk. With an early adopter audience for this survey, I expected to be in the middle of the pack of with my design and development practices.
Well I am with my choice of OS, Tiger on the laptop, XP (not my choice) at work, browser of choice Firefox 3 (well 3.1 beta) and even our work environment with linux, apache, PHP, PostgreSQL and MySQL. But then things do take a surprising turn.
Around 25% of respondents test sites in a mobile browser, 33% use microformats, 4% use RDFA (it has been in my footer for a couple of years now), 4% use @font-face (I was one of the six respondents to use both TTF/OTF and EOT formats), all things I do and most for a year or two (@font-face excluded).
So I am ahead of the early adopters and this scares me. Because for the last two years I have not been pushing my craft, I have been reading less, particularly leading edge web development blogs and up until a few weeks ago not experimenting.
So if I have lazy for the last couple of years, why am I still ahead of the pack. Wishful thinking is that most people have been gaining knowledge with javascript libraries and frameworks, as well as back-end frameworks. A couple of areas I need to invest some time in, but looking at the survey results I could still be classed as an early adopter with javascript libraries and frameworks and my back-end skills have never been good.
Instead I believe not enough people are pushing their skills, not spending enough time seeking out what other people are doing, learning new and cool stuff and just having fun experimenting. Well I am not going to be one of them, so I hope you will at least join me for the ride if you are not going to push yourself.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:58 am
Hi Nick,
thanks for the thoughts.
I have a feeling that it’s in the area of programming — JavaScript, libraries, back end programming, that people’s efforts have been most focussed.
It;s also interesting that a sizable minority are keeping up with CSS3, but a lot of it seems to be about catching up to long advocated best practices.
j
January 9th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
John, it is more I have been asleep at the wheel for a couple of years with regard to CSS and HTML developments. My excuse was waiting for IE to catch up. I wake up look around and find out that I am still ahead of the pack.
There has been some great work being down with JavaScript particularly libraries and frameworks and I hope most people have been making use of this great work, instead of waiting for IE to catch up.
January 13th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Hey Nick — i think a lot of it comes down on the pressure to produce work at what is effectively bargain basement pricing. Until we do a better job of getting paid the value of work, I think there will be less time available to play.
But that’s just a hunch.