Web Authoring Statistics
In December 2005, Google did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. The results are now available - and very interesting:
It seems most pages use presentational attributes: the fourth most used attribute across all elements is the
tableelement’sborderattribute, followed by theheightandwidthattributes onimg, followed by<table width="">,<table cellspacing="">,<img border="">, and<table cellpadding="">. Interestingly, though, the most frequently used attribute on thebodyelement (namelybgcolor) is only used on around half of pages, with all the other presentational attributes onbodybeing used even less. One possible explanation is that on average, colors are mostly done using CSS, while layout is mostly done using HTML tables.
January 30th, 2006
1:00 pm
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Russ
My favourite is that the number of pages with a least one table element is twice the number of pages with a td element.
January 30th, 2006
2:55 pm
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Great to see John Allsopp’s work referenced by Google!
On the Editors and Their Custom Markup page, they refer to etc tags, saying they are not sure where they come from. They actually appear when you save a Word doc as HTML, and they are the dreaded Microsof Smart Tags.
February 9th, 2006
6:09 pm
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I find it interesting that so much presentational markup is still to be found around the web. It’s now almost ten years since CSS1 first became a W3C Recommendation.
While I suppose some of based on legacy material, I wonder how much it relates to the slow up-take of standards in web browsers, and the intricacies involved in effectively seperating content and presentation?
In fact, the use of SVG to display the charts and graphs is a classic example of slow uptake. I currently can’t view that site using IE (although I know I haven’t installed the SVG viewer), and I know someone who installed the latest IE SVG viewer and still could not view the site using IE.