Abstract: The World Wide Web (web) is a heterogeneous environment that is in constant evolutionary change. This includes technological changes such as JavaScript, the management of data structures used to present the web content such as the Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML), and guidelines such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). A lag was noticed between the time these standards and recommendations were introduced to when they were adopted by the developers. This causes a disconnection between the actual user experience, and what was expected by the technology stake-holders. In this study, we investigate the relationship that surrounds these issues, especially those involving the web user interface. Different sets of data were collected to look at the current and long term slices of websites, and the correlation between the top websites and a set of randomly selected websites. Our results show a trend that new standards and recommendations get adopted faster by the top websites than the random websites. The time taken for this adoption varies between the different types of standards and recommendations; for example, the top websites on average get adopted one year faster than the random websites for a major (X)HTML standards, while it will take on average two years for a graphical format to get adopted. An initial decline in JavaScript usage was noticed for the past year (2007-2008), although a continuous increase in Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) usage was observed. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) took nine years to get adopted by > 50% of the random websites, however a healthy growth was predicted to continue. After ten years, it was observed that < 10% of the websites conform to the WCAG. By understanding these evolutionary trends we can inform and predict web development into the future.
Abstract: World Wide Web (Web) documents, once delivered in a form that remained constant whilst viewed, are now often dynamic, with sections of a page able to change independently (and not requiring a full page reload), either automatically or as a result of user interaction. In order to make these updates, and hence their host pages, accessible, it is necessary to detect when the update occurs and how it has changed the page, before determining how, when and what to present to the user. This can only be achieved with an understanding of the technologies used to achieve dynamic updates and the human factors influencing how people use them. This report classifies the types of update that may be included on a page and reviews the techniques available to Web developers for achieving them. This is complemented by an analysis of Web pages, including the most popular pages and a random selection, which investigates how frequently some technologies are implemented. While JavaScript is used in nearly all sites, and Flash in about half, AJAX is used in some 20% of the current top 20 pages.
