JavaScript

Only a little bit less pages use JavaScript than CSS ? 65.09% of pages (CSS was used by 67.20%).

Although W3C mentions only 3 ways to attatch JavaScript to HTML, an entire 25% of pages uses also the third method: JavaScript URI-s, like the following:

<a href="javascript: alert('Hello!');">JS link</a>

On the other hand, most pages using JavaScript URI-s, also use other more standard methods for JavaScript attatching, which I?m going to discuss right now.

Figure 38 lists the combinations of different JavaScript attatchment methods and how much each of those is being used. The interesting thing is, that most common is to use all the methods together. Both the external JavaScript only and external plus inline are used only on about 10% of JavaScript pages.

The following figure 39 shows the distribution of different JavaScript attatching methods by the size of script code. Similarly to CSS the scripts in external .js files are usually larger than the one embedded into HTML. But quite differently from CSS the most common way is to embed JavaScript between script tags.

AJAX

Because of some problems/bugs with the program, only the string XMLHttpRequest was looked for in JavaScript files. On 6125 pages this search found a match. This means that 1.90% of pages with JavaScript were using AJAX or similar technology.

At this point the document ends. There should be some kind of conclusions chapter here, but at the moment I?m too tired to write one. Maybe I?ll write it in the future if I find some time for that. For an overview of the main points in this research you can read the abstract.