Last year, we looked at a variety of CSS metrics in the HTTP Archive, to assess the state of the technology in 2019. This year, we went a lot deeper, to measure not only how many pages use a given CSS feature, but also how they use it.
Overall, what we observed was a Web in two different gears when it comes to CSS adoption. In our blog posts and twitter bubbles, we tend to mostly discuss the newest and shiniest. However, as it turns out, most CSS usage in the wild is fairly simple. CSS Variables are mostly used as constants and rarely refer to other variables, calc() is mostly used with two terms, gradients mostly have two stops and so on.
The Web is not a teenager any more. It is now 30 years old, and acts like it. It tends to favor stability over new bling, and readability over complexity, occasional guilty pleasures aside.