Some Highlights of the Web Almanac 2024

Appreciating the good work, people doing the effort

The community led organization of contributors behind the web almanac is something to behold and admire. Just look at their organization – the enormous effort put in – it is truly impressive. Lets just list some of the virtues of this project made of:

Values led, data driven

Look at the chapter on sustainability, particularly What’s New. See the effort put in to the research and the science basically, it is so good.

They have an accessibility strategy

Check out their well written accessibility notice.

All about the web

Example: DocType - Markup Chapter

I have written about DocType’s before. Now from the Almanac I can see some hard data behind the concept:

93% of all mobile pages use the standard HTML doctype. That is, <!DOCTYPE html>.

This is 3 percentage points higher than the 2022 data. The surprising part is the next most popular: XHTML 1.1 Transitional—but slowly disappearing (2.7%, down from 3.9% in 2022).

Example: Performance - Time to First Byte

Sometimes not much changes year to year. This itself is very useful data.

Example: Markup - Custom Elements

Sometimes a chapter will inform you – or confirm – a trend. With confidence we can say that custom elements, one feature of web components, is on the rise in usage.

Example: Accessibility - font sizes statistics

How font sizes are defined also affects the readability, as pixels are not as flexible as other units. Pixel (px) use is 65% in desktop and 66% in mobile. The use of em has increased to 9% from 6% in 2022. rem was at 6% in 2022, and has reduced to 4% now. There is not a significant increase in the use of em or rem since 2022, even though it often gives the user a better experience when they increase or decrease their font size in their browser settings.