State of CSS 2026: the year of anchor positioning ⚓️
State of CSS 2026 results: interest in Anchor Positioning, AI adoption in styling and shifts in tooling.
The results of the annual State of CSS 2026 survey have been published. Developers answered a whole bunch of questions: attitudes toward new features, main pain points, toolkits they use, a separate section on AI, and respondent demographics.
Highlights from the results:
- Anchor Positioning is the feature of the year. Everyone wants to use anchor positioning, but incomplete browser support means many are still waiting. In general, this is a common trend in modern web development: features announced with great fanfare take another couple of years to reach Widely Available status, and the initial hype has time to fade. Addressing this problem is one reason the Interop initiative and surveys like these exist.
- Modest AI progress in styling. AI use for writing styles lags noticeably behind JS and HTML. Neural networks are still quite bad at “visualizing” CSS in their digital minds, so developers are in no hurry to trust them with interface styling.
- Ecosystem and tools:
- Frameworks hold their positions without dramatic shifts.
- Preprocessors continue to gradually fade into the past.
- ESLint has jumped to second place in the tools category.
See the detailed results here: 2026.stateofcss.com
Remember to participate in studies like these. They genuinely help browser vendors and specification authors understand developer sentiment and adjust the web platform’s direction.