What about dynamically analyzing the source

[hkjels]

First off. I really like your idea here! But instead of answering such a long form about the code; perhaps it should be turned into a service where you simply point to a gist for dynamic analyzation. If it was that easy to use, it would probably become mainstream. When it's finally mainstream, package-managers etc could use the rating for sorting.

[triblondon]

It would be quite hard to automate the testing of many of these things. Certainly not impossible (except in a few cases) but automation is not really what jsmanners is for. It's more designed as a means for companies to hold potential suppliers to account for the practices in their code.

Even fairly simple things like the total download size is hard to test automatically because there might be server side logic going on to vary the code served by browser user agent.

Do you have any specific suggestions for an automation approach?

[hkjels]

I think we could definitely parse the source and find out about variable-scope, use of document.write, use of cookies etc. And with a short initialization in a gist, we could detect operations in normal mode and some more behavior. But for sure, there are still questions that are next to impossible to answer through automated analysis. When discussing this, I realize that there's still SO much that needs to be done with the whole arena of using javascript.