Site elements surveys

Posted by Sam Soltano on 22 June 2011 in News, Site Elements

These new site element surveys cover four areas:

• Usage of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This includes the way of defining the CSS rules: external CSS, embedded or inline.
• Usage of Cookies. This also reports certain properties of cookies, such as secure cookies and HTTP-only cookies. We also report on the life span of the cookies: session cookies or persistent cookies, which we further distinguish according to their expiry time. One thing to consider when using our cookies report is, that the W3Techs web robot never tries to submit information to a website (e.g. login information), and therefore does not detect cookies which are defined in those transactions. That means, we under-report the usage of cookies.
• HTTP compression, which we analyze according to the compression method used.
• Usage of Framesets. It would be an understatement to say that frames (not iframes) have gone out of fashion in modern website development. The heated debate pro and contra frames took place 10 or more years ago. Nevertheless, frames are still used by 1.7% of all sites, including some of the top 10,000 sites.

Whenever we start a new survey category, our reporting system automatically gives us a lot of additional, derived reports, which are quite interesting to examine. For the moment I want to present only one of them as an example: The compressing ranking breakdown report shows that 37.5% of all websites use some form of compression. But that percentage is much higher for high traffic sites. For the top 1,000 sites, that percentage reaches even 77.7%.

I hope you find the new reports useful, and would like to invite you to explore them a little bit.

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