Download websites that use Raphael

About Raphael

A drawing library on a page usually means somebody wanted a chart there. With Raphael the safer reading is that somebody wanted one a long time ago and the front end has not been rebuilt since.

When Raphael appeared in 2008, drawing a shape in a browser was a compatibility problem rather than a design problem. Standards-compliant browsers understood SVG and Internet Explorer understood VML, and a developer who wanted a chart on a page had to target both. Written in JavaScript and released under the MIT license, Raphael hid that split behind a single drawing API, and charts, org diagrams, interactive maps and dashboard widgets across the late jQuery era were built on it. The library stayed installed long after the compatibility problem it solved disappeared, because vector code written against its API keeps working and rewriting a chart that still renders is nobody's priority.

Version data tells the rest of the story. We resolve 13 distinct version strings across the sites where a version is readable, and 2.1.4 accounts for a large part of them. Releases the project published later account for only a small slice of the population, so most of what we find sits behind the project's own last version rather than at it. An installed base spread across builds nobody replaced is an installed base nobody is upgrading, and in most cases nobody is touching at all.

The practical value in a dataset is as a marker of age. A page still loading Raphael was built when the library was current and has not had its front end rebuilt since. Around it you will usually find an older jQuery, a CMS theme from the same period, dependencies with published advisories, and a layout that predates the mobile-first rewrite the rest of the market went through. Agencies selling redesigns, security teams sizing legacy exposure and framework vendors pitching migrations are all looking at one population from different angles.

Detection carries a bias worth stating. We identify the library from the script file it loads and the global object it defines, so a site that bundles and minifies it into a single application file may not register at all. The visible population therefore skews toward sites that never adopted a build step, which are also the sites that tend to have been left alone. The count is a floor, and the deployments it misses are, if anything, slightly more modern than the ones it finds.

Checking one domain tells you that a single site still ships the library. A list tells you how much of the web is still standing on code whose last release predates the current framework generation, where those pages are hosted, and what else runs beside them. As of September 2026 that population is 13,853 sites, and the useful work starts when it is intersected with the other columns in the same file.