Web Evolution: Method and Materials

The World Wide Web (Web) is a heterogeneous environment that is in constant evolutionary change. This includes technological changes, the management of data structures used to present the Web content, and guidelines. 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. A trend was noticed that new standards and recommendations get adopted faster by the top websites than the random websites. 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. A dip in JavaScript usage was noticed for the past year (2007-2008), although a continuous increase in AJAX usage was observed, and a growth was predicted to continue for CSS. After ten years < 10% of the websites conform to the WCAG. By understanding these evolutionary trends we can inform and predict Web development into the future.