Poll Results for Managing Styles with JavaScript

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In our last poll, we asked “What’s your take on managing styles entirely in JavaScript?”. This is a concept we wrote about in depth here and recently talked about in a panel on ShopTalk.

Over 23,000 people voted.

See the Pen Crazy Pie Chart by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

The largest contingent, at 49%, voted “Are you insane? This is an awful idea.”. Only 6% voted “I love it. I’m all in. CSS is over.”. More people are strongly against the idea than strongly for it. But it does mean that more than half of people don’t necessarily dislike it. In fact one notch down from dislike was “It kinda rubs me the wrong way, but I’m trying to be open minded about it.” which was the second largest contingent at 26%. Next down was the favorable “I think it’s an interesting idea and makes sense in some situations.” leaving only 5% completely on the fence with “I don’t feel strongly about it either way.”

Overall I guess I’d say the response was a bit more welcoming that I would have expected on a CSS site, and the bias that evokes. The phrasing likely affected that as well, but I’m happy with it.

This poll will be particularly interesting to look at again in a year or two. I don’t have a good sense if this idea of styling only through JavaScript has legs or not. I have a fairly strong sense that CSS is far from “over” for most sites on the web, but even if we scoped it to “large, very dynamic sites” we’ll have to see where that needle is down the road a few years.