- Survey link: <a href="https://survey.devographics.com/en-US/survey/state-of-html/2023" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://survey.devographics.com/en-US/survey/state-of-html/2...</a><p>- State of HTML: <a href="https://stateofhtml.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://stateofhtml.com/</a><p>It's the same organization (<a href="https://www.devographics.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.devographics.com/</a>) behind "State of Js" (<a href="https://stateofjs.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://stateofjs.com</a>)<p>Took me a couple minutes to verify that
I learn from books and for front-end development I learned from O'Reilly's "The Definitive Guide" series. There's a recent edition for both CSS and JavaScript but not for HTML. Just look at the survey, HTML is huge and touches or at least rubs against everything.<p>Whenever I pick up a book to brush up on HTML it always a 98 chapter, 10,000 page tome book called "XYZ & HTML: The Complete Guide For Real". Chapter 1: HTML (pages 1-2). Chapters 2-98: CSS (pages 3-10,000).<p>I'd really like to see an "HTML: The Definitive Guide" that treats HTML as the nexus of web technologies that it is.
Towards the end of the survey, they asked us to choose 3 html features we'd like to see supported in the future. Infinite scroll was one of the options, but I really wish they threw in pagination as well. If I never had to code a pagination widget again, I'd be a happy man.
Hats off to whoever created the landing page. It is crystal clear in explaining its intent and benefits for the audience. It’s like the author is reading my mind as I’m scrolling down.
I've done a few pages, but it just asks "do you know this feature?". Do you know document.getElementThatWasClicked2SecondsAgo()? Do you know document.getElementThatWasClicked3SecondsAgo()? And document.getElementThatWasClicked4SecondsAgo()? Etc.<p>I didn't get to the point where I could say: stop adding lock-in features to Chrome, or remove the privacy invading stuff from it.
Will be interesting to see results, as HTML did not evolve too much during last year, or last 5 years even. Also, what are JS APIs doing in this survey?
Was there ever anything added to HTML that would make <script> tags defined inside a div or other container tag essentially lexically scoped to tags and elements only within that div?<p>One of the values of frames was that it did that. Most "portal" frameworks I've seen are nightmares of spaghetti code trying to route around this, and it prevents any true fragment-consumption without the iframe.<p>It also would allow likely a lot more "rich widgets" where a mess of javascript was contained only in the section of the HTML document needed by that widget, so a library/zoo/collection of widgets could be safely put together.
Oof, this should be pretty humbling to most web developers.<p>I don't even want to reveal my "feature score" from the end of the survey.
I see a lot of pent up frustration towards JavaScript and the large companies that control our browsers and the internet (perhaps because I see a lot of myself :).<p>I wonder if a new browser that doesn't treat JavaScript as a special language will ever succeed? How long until the DOM is usable in languages other than JavaScript? Yesterday I read about someone writing their own browser, which they didn't expect to succeed, but I think a lot of people might jump at the first chance they get to leave big tech companies and JavaScript behind. I lump JavaScript and big tech companies together, but their problems are very different; it would be a breath of fresh air to leave either though.<p>The W3C says: "As a W3C specification, one important objective for the Document Object Model is to provide a standard programming interface that can be used in a wide variety of environments and applications. The Document Object Model can be used with any programming language."[0] How long until this is true in a practical way? Has there ever been a more widely used and important API that is constrained to only one language?<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-DOM/introduction.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-DOM/introduction.html</a>
Since there are a few comments on JS, I recommend reading this section in the article: "Why are there JS questions in an HTML survey?"<p>An excerpt:<p>> If you don’t write any JS, we absolutely still want to hear from you! In fact, I would encourage you to fill out the survey <i>even more</i>: we need to hear from folks who don’t write JS, as they are often underrepresented. Please feel free to skip any JS-related questions (all questions are optional anyway) or select that you have never heard these features. There is a question at the end, where you can select that you only write HTML/CSS
For a HTML survey, there was a heck of a lot about JS in there so I quit it. Not for me.<p>I quit JS for HTMX because time in JS, fully loaded time with framework knowledge and maintenance, is just not very important for my use case which is CRUD apps. The change to HTMX saves me time, it saves users' time, it gives a consistent experience for both.<p>That's not to say JS is bad. I'm not dying on that hill as it's not true - pick the tool for the job. But a HTML survey this is not, it's a <i>HTML for JSers</i> survey.
I hope 100% of the respondents answer that they've used "Content-Security Policy (CSP)" as it's there by default and by answering anything else, they probably out themselves as basically not knowing their own space where they work.