Survey

It may be useful for W3C to do a Web practitioner survey, like several other organizations have done, though ours should focus more specifically on questions pertinent to standardization.

Inspiration

Here are a few other Web practitioner surveys, which we can look to for data and for future collaboration.

Web Directions

John Allsopp has done various surveys for some time:

• http://www.webdirections.org/blog/state-of-mobile-web-development-report/
• http://www.webdirections.org/sotw10/
• http://www.webdirections.org/the-state-of-the-web-2008/

A List Apart

Web Design Survey

• 2007: announcement and results
• 2008: announcement and results
• 2009: announcement and results
• 2010: announcement and results
• 2011: announcement

AIGA

• AIGA-Aquent Survey of Design Salaries

The Information Architecture Institute

• Salary Survey, 2005
• Salary Survey, 2010
• Industry Surveys

Audiences

W3C is uniquely positioned to reach a wide segment of Web developers, and to a lesser extent Web designers, through its reputation, its existing and ongoing events, and through its membership.

We can ask our members to have their Web-related employees take the survey, as well as making it available and promoting it publicly.

Infrastructure

Currently, W3C has a flexible balloting system, WBS, though it could benefit from improved usability for creating, answering, and reporting surveys. If W3C increases its use of public surveys for collecting information and for registering event participants, it may be worth investing resources in improving WBS or using another open-source balloting system.

Survey Focus

Other surveys cover job titles and salary ranges, and other things like job satisfaction, security, and perceived bias; while we could also benefit from that information, we should emphasize questions that relates specifically to technology usage and standardization successes and shortcomings.

For example:

• Do you use SVG? If not, why not? Do you know that SVG can be exported from Illustrator? If you do use SVG, what script libraries do you use with it?
• Do you use WebFonts and WOFF? Do you use fre fonts, or do you pay for them? if you purchase fonts, do you use a service or serve them from your own servers?
• What are the top 3 things missing from the Open Web Platform? Which specs are you most anticipating, or do you most need?
• Do you read technical specifications, or do you primarily get your information elsewhere? If so, where?
• Are you using any metadata functionality like RDFa, microdata, or microformats? Which do you use? How often do you use them in your professional projects, or in your personal projects?
• What sites or tools do you use to collaborate?
• Which script libraries do you use? Why those libraries? Which features do you most think should become standardized?