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A Statistical Review of 1 Billion Web Pages
chrisd writes "As part of a recent examination of the most popular html authoring techniques, my colleague Ian Hickson parsed through a billion web pages from the Google repository to find out what are the most popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. We decided that to publish this would be of significant utility to developers. It's also a fascinating look into how people create web pages. For instance one thing that surprised me was that the <title> is more popular than <br>. The graphs in the report require a browser with SVG and CSS support (like Firefox 1.5!). Enjoy!"
and all I got was Britney Spears.
Sheesh.
if the tag isn't on the top elements list.
the tag.
well when people talk like this and dont bother using punctuation spacekeys or any of the skills that they have been taught in school its no wonder why webpages turn out like this not to mention those long runon sentences and also all that broken code that are the fist attempt at a webpage by a twelve year old kid who tried to steal someone elses layout and replaced the word with his own then you start to look at all of those dynamically generated webpages and the layouts and the style sheets and its no wonder why the good old br tag never get a work out.
An un-slashdottable server.
With css power you really do not need to use br, maybe that is the reason for the small stats for the tag's use?
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
I was expecting a few GOTO commands.
For Example:
IF browser="IE" GOTO Spyware
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
It didn't have everything of course. Some elements were censored on behalf of the Chinese government.
I question his results.
I have to ask, what's the purpose of a 1-BILLION page sample? That's the beautiful thing about statistics. If you can say something about the distribution of characteristics within a population, you don't have to survey the entire population to get meaningful results. Are the study authors proposing that no standard distribution can be applied to the entire universe of web pages? If that's the case, then do the statistics they apply to their sample of one billion really say anything predictive about the entire population?
Aside from the cool factor of saying they sampled a billion pages, I don't see what extra benefits are gained from that extra effort.
I am still at the 22nd page, lot more to go (1 billion? OMG!).. see you all there
Their study on the <img> element is quite interesting.
3/4 of the parsed pages use alt text with their <img> tags, and about 10% use image maps... which I find a little scary. I haven't seen an image map in years.
we haven't slashdotted the google server... but it would appear that the firefox download site for extensions is.
The 'br' element
The br element is a simple one, yet used on so many pages that it is the 8th most-used element. It is used more than the p element.
clear, style, class, soft, id, and \.
Wow! I never knew you guys were that popular.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Not just non-evil. This is useful and interesting stuff.
"Unfortunately, it was also of significant interest to the DOJ, who wanted to know how many times the word 'boobs' appeared in the first 50 characters after the string "IMG SRC". Because we didn't actually look for this data, and because the DOJ folks didn't believe us when we told them so, we're now enjoying a taxpayer-funded vacation in sunny Cuba."
> We decided that to publish this would be of significant utility to developers
whom we would encourage to send lawyers, guns and money; the blink tag now encloses the rotating ad banner.
Prove that most people (and WYSIWYGs) don't know how to produce valid and accessible markup. The img alt attibute (an accessibility requirement) was found significantly less than width, height, and border.
I'm working on a site now where the project owner is continually reducing usability and accessibilty of the entire site (Never mind that he secretly had a third party come up with an ugly design and ambushed the dev team with it).
I keep telling everyone to deconstruct the adage "form follows function". It means function comes first. He doesn't care what anything *is* or how it *works*, only what it looks like. And, of course, that it's ugly.
so I'm using debian sarge, and oh well - flame about dozens of other distros, but currently I'm too lazy[1] to update to etch, or anything else. And in sarge there is firefox 1.0.4 without SVG. Anyone knows some backported debs for sarge that will provide SVG support?
/. but in fact I have some work to do, and this work is not switching linux distros around.
[1] everything is about priorites, I spend some time reading
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
It's really dumb to present pictures with Flash.
It looks like a subtle push against IE: many mantions of the HTML 5 spec (which is being written by WHAT a workgroup that includes many browser companies but not MS); use of SVG; written by a major FF developer.
Way to go Google! Pour on the pressure!
I'm curious to see how closely Benford's Law is followed by these pages. It should be easy for Google to run the stats.
-- SIGFPE
Some choice tidbits FTA:
For example, looking at what HTML ids and classes are most common, and at how many sites validate (and yes, we know that we're not leading the way in terms of validation).
There are more elements (from Microsoft Office) on the Web than there are elements.
If someone can explain why so many pages would use a tag and then not put any cells in it, please let us know.
Web "professionals" (and I am one of that group) have got a long, long, long way to go before we're actually taken seriously, it seems, as coders.
Again, properly formatted this time:
For example, looking at what HTML ids and classes are most common, and at how many sites validate (and yes, we know that we're not leading the way in terms of validation).
There are more <o:p> elements (from Microsoft Office) on the Web than there are <h6> elements.
If someone can explain why so many pages would use a <table> tag and then not put any cells in it, please let us know.
Web "professionals" (and I am one of that group) have got a long, long, long way to go before we're actually taken seriously, it seems, as coders.
Not so fast - I'm pulling up mostly blank pages...
Classes
How many different class names do pages use? Well, most pages apparently don't use the class attribute at all, and it's downhill from there:
(nothing for about 15 lines)
Which class names are used on the most pages? Here are the top 20:
(nothing for about 15 lines)
This actually maps very well to the elements that are being proposed in HTML5:
etc...
Working fine here (Linux version).
With all of this talk of the justice department requesting records from Google.
Why could they not just use this method to get their data?
They showed up fine for me. I had to upgrade (installed version was 1.07) but they certainly loaded.
One thing that screws up web page studies is that some sites duplicate pages hundreds or thousands of times.
Oliver Steele did a cute study on how to spell aargh.
Unfortunately much of his data is screwed up because he counted pages for each spelling not unique pages.
For this study, I don't see this problem ocurring.
...irony!
-- SIGFPE
The most work on this, in the case of the WWW is the frequency with which pages are hyperlinked. A lot of work has been done on hyperlinking without access to the exhaustive database used by Google. I know that Google's business model started with rank ordering pages on their results by how often they were href'ed elsewhere so the data is there obviously and it wouldn't be a serious imposition on their proprietary information to publish analysis of the href power law.
Seastead this.
Whilst may appear on more distinct pages,
surely is used more frequently in the aggregate; that is, the multiplicity of occurrences of
on many pages far exceeds the single(?) occurrence of on most pages.
FYI, Opera also supports SVG. I'm surprised that Ian Hickson didn't have Opera also mentioned on that Google page, after all he worked at Opera until a few months ago.
Opera Watch - An Opera browser blog.
Same here. A few show up, but most are blank. Suggestions, anyone?
For instance one thing that surprised me was that the "title" is more popular than "br".
Err...this isn't a count of the number of times an attribute is used in a page. It's a count of the number of pages that make use of an attribute.
A page using "title" once and "br" 10 times will show once in each column.
More pages have titles than contain at least 1 br tag. Given that a nonzero number of pages are ads, images, or otherwise have no text, why would this suprise you?
BTW, slashdot appears neither to respect unrecognized tags nor usual escape sequences like < sometext >...
For instance one thing that surprised me was that the <title> is more popular than <br>
I'm not surprised. The TITLE container is required for every HTML page to be considered valid across all versions and is the most important text on the page, used by search engines to link to the page. Though browsers will accept pages without it, you'd be a damn fool not to use it.
BR is optional and generally unnecessary when P handles your general hard line breaking needs. Even with TITLE being once, only once, and no less than once per page while there can be several BR tags on a page, BR is generally omissable. I'd expect overuse of BR to be more common on blogs that don't bother to detect paragraphs.
Now if it were TITLE vs. TR there'd be no contest.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I wonder how much of what they found is influenced by how people learned to write HTML - which in all likelihood was to copy code from existing pages... might explain parts of what they found, such as:
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
In their list of the 19 most popular elements, the font tag was #16. This element was deprecated when, back in 2000 or so?
Of course, there may have been a lot of old pages in the sample, or pages built with older versions of HTML. But I've seen first-hand people using font tags to make an error message red, for example, even in a page that's using XHTML 1.0. I try to explain to the developers I work with why they shouldn't use them. I remove the font tags when those same developers add them to pages I've laid out for them. Zombie-like, they refuse to die.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Your code usually goes like this:
So it is quite easy to get the empty table if the collection is empty.
No sig today.
Working fine here (WinDoze version).
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
Capitalization makes all the difference in the sentence:
i helped my uncle jack off a horse
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Try using a SVG compatible browser. SVG graphics *tend to* work better that way.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Go grab Seamonkey.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
What browser version are you using?
What operating system?
You need a standards compliant browser i.e. one that implements SVG such as FireFox 1.5 or Opera 9.
I am using FF 1.5 on XP and it's all good. These are excellently presented graphical data, the way the web is supposed to work.
IE won't work because it doesn't support the standard.
W98 users note: You need [Opera 9] or [FF 1.5 beta 1 (not a later FF release) and GDI+ installed]
And IE6 + ASV6 (http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/beta.html ) doesn't work either. All the graphs are blank, and if I go directly to svg by url, I get a big black rectangle.
I vote this as the worst use of svg on the internet.
Didn't need a billion page analysis to point out that horrible fact.
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
I would be interested in seeing how many web pages use Java applets, Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime, ActiveX controls etc, etc. Sadly the authors did not include this information.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
It does, but the latest version (8.51) doesn't appear to deal with the graphs very well. It just shows black blocks.
Cool browser! Unfortunately, it didn't help... I suspect the content's being blocked locally somehow.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
You're right about BR. It's just about useless these days.
Look at this sentence from the 'HTTP Headers' section:
Excuse me? the link header is for including stylesheets (among other uses). The fact that they've got such! emphatic! pucntuation! here makes me wonder just how important they took this study, and what kind of employees they made responsible for it.
Talk about knee-jerk moderation...
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Works fine for me using Firefox 1.5 under Suse 9.3.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Euh... who is being thick now? That page is about HTTP Headers, not elements you find in the element of an HTML page. Specifically, the Link HTTP header mentioned refers to Section 19.6.2.4 of RFC 2068.
And yeah... it ignored CSS. It's looking at page elements in order to help out the WHAT folks.
Pretty crappy page authoring...not to tell a poor end user that he/she was missing a required viewer (w/ Mozilla 1.7.6). My old Firefox 1.0 showed a "click here to download plug-in", but never came back with a plug-in. (OK, so then I tried Firefox 1.5 and it worked.)
The latest Opera shows the graphs as black rectangles as well.
As does the Batik squiggle project.
The only way I've sucessfully seen a graph is to view the source in IE, manually build the link to the svg, and go directly to the svg in the Firefox browser.
Among the top 15 attributes used in the [script] tag are the following:
. html
"langauge"
"langugage"
"languaje"
Link to that page in the stats:
http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/scripting
I just have no comment to this.
Firefox 1.5 and Seamonkey 1.0 are both based on Mozilla 1.8.0. When they use the exact same rendering engine, how would switching from one of them to the other give you any difference in how a site works? It won't, and I suspect that you knew that and just used this opportunity to advertise your favorite browser.
Now, if you had just replied to the article and pointed out that Seamonkey is another browser that also supports SVG, that would be totally fair; but instead you chose to reply to someone asking for help because their Firefox wouldn't show it (which is strange; mine does), telling them to grab Seamonkey, even though you knew it wouldn't make a difference as they use the same rendering engine, just to spread FUD about Firefox because you want people to use Seamonkey instead. And that is NOT fair.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
The graphs showed up once I installed the Adobe SVG Viewer: http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html
The black box is caused by them not using type="text/css" on the ?xml-stylesheet declaration. type is a required attribute. If I add that it renders properly on all the svg viewers I tried.
Web developers shouldn't aim for writing for one browser, but as many as possible.
They're doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing.
They're doing what led us into this shitty IE situation in the first place; targetting specific browsers instead of the public.
Can anyone tell me what's here that can't be visualized with GIF's?
Even if it'd mean less features for the user, they should at least graciously fall back to a more basic technology than SVG's.
How do these pages look on IE, Opera, Safari, or Konqueror under default configurations?
If this is what Google sometimes wish to do, design pages to push a specific browser, they're no better than Microsoft.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
This kind of misunderstanding is why people should learn the proper names for things. The study is referring to the Link HTTP header. You are referring to the <link> HTML element type. Headers are not element types, even if most people call both of them "tags".
Using the Link HTTP header for stylesheets is not practical because most browsers don't support it and those that do only added support recently.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Talk about a flaming faggot.
Or are you not the egotistical type?
So far everyone who has replied to you has ignored one thing. A thousand may be fine for seeing a simple "A or B" statistical difference at significant levels; with ANOVA you can even track a few different significant traits.
The number of traits they were trying to discover was unknown at the start; furthermore, they expected it to be very high. Lots of different HTML tags in the standards, but even more nonstandard tags, nonstandard attributes; they even found information about how different attributes are misspelled. Example: nobody can spell "language" on the <script> tag, and they can tell you exactly how many spell it "langauge". They found lots of data points that wouldn't have existed in a sample of a thousand. (My guess is they almost all would existed in a sample of a million, but in numbers too small for statistical significance.)
Most people would have settled for a million, I think, but if you have the resources to get a billion, there actually is useful information in there for you to use.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I laughed when I read this... "The \ "attribute" is almost certainly the result of people writing markup like (br\) when intending to do (br). Of course, neither is particularly useful to browsers when the page is sent as text/html (as all these pages were)."
(OK, for those who don't get it, one reason that so much content is sent with an "incorrect" text/html header is that many proxy servers will dump content on the floor unless it has a text/html header.)
Between the questionable conclusions and the sometimes poor quality of the writing (not to mention, are there graphs and charts? I didn't see any.), I wonder about the usefulness of such an analysis.
Take, for example, the commentary on the element. Abuse is in the eye of the beholder. A number of pages don't follow standards or use deprecated elements. In some cases, that's not entirely the fault of the authors. If I'm developing a corporate site that demands backwards compatibility to Netscape 4.x or an ancient version of IE, I'm certainly not going to jump through all sorts of hoops with layered CSS hacks when I can just use a deprecated element.
And which specifications are we talking about? If I include those elements and validate my document, which elements will fail? At present six by my count (and not five) of those attributes in are deprecated by the W3C for HTML 4.0.
Regarding the use of classes, I wonder how much HTML coding the authors do. I have had countless opportunities to style an element using a "copyright" class (rather than something like "small"). In some ways, it's a better practice since it describes the element rather than the style being applied to that element. It's still not ideal, but in the real world, I can remember that this element, like footer, appears in a certain place on the page and style it accordingly. Using a element is not a substitute; it's not meta-data, it's a display element the user sees.
Similarly, "The button class baffles us. We can't really tell what what it is used for. Similarly, the link class, which is apparently very popular, seems strange. Why would authors label something with that class?" How about I have a submit button and a link side-by-side and I want them to look the same (that is, both appear as buttons)? If it makes sense from a user experience standpoint, then I'll use it. I can certainly see using a link class to style certain links on a page (say in a left navigation or the body) different from others. It's sloppy, but it gets the job done and, even though I'd avoid it whenever possible, I'm not going to slam someone else for doing so.
And on it goes, "onmouseover on a elements is a little worrying; presumably those are mostly cases of the status bar being overridden". How about image rollovers for navigation? Empirically, I've seen fifty sites with image rollovers for every site that changes the status line. The authors then state (in the next section) that the relative few uses on the element is the assumption that few people are using rollovers. Since they typically are applied to the anchor, this is an erroneous assumption. Of course, why bother with scripting events when you can use CSS (apart from pesky backwards compatibility)?
In general, the tone of the article seems to be that many people should not be allowed on the web because they can't follow standards (and are illiterate, in many cases). Nothing is said about browser being inconsistent in following standards, nor about how many of those pages are legacy pages from who knows when. The general attitude seems to be that HTML is as rigorous as a programming language. If that last were the case, browsers would only display pages that conformed to the 4.01 Strict standard or maybe the XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD. I mean, if you really want to slam users for not caring what the standards say, see how many of those documents are properly formed according to the XHTML standards. I don't even have to do an "analysis" to know the number would be very much on the low side.
What I mean by spreading FUD is that your comment implies that Firefox's support for SVG is not as good as Seamonkey's, when it is in fact exactly the same. Also, I'm not trying to start a Seamonkey vs. Firefox flamewar here.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
So, do the results follow Zipf's law?
Opera 9 can handle the graphs (8.5 doesn't), but it's still in beta. Interestingly, on my Linux box, the Opera 9 preview renders the pages faster and scrolls more smoothly than Firefox 1.5 (scrolling the first page with three graphs is really slow in FF), but the scale is much smaller. To actually read the graphs on Opera I have to zoom in about 200%.
Wasn't creating a Window-Target HTTP header a trick for always breaking out of other people's frames (if someone links to your site and framed your site content within their own). I thought it was more reliable (back in 1999/2000) than the various JS tricks for breaking out of frames.
http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html got suitable plugins for browsers/OS of choice.
.ogg. Rootless promotion of this kind...
Notice that I got SVG plugin installed for ages, Safari didn't display the graphs. Is it because I am not using "a browser with CSS"? Well, nevermind really...
This is the thing why I and others have negative views against firefox, svg and even
There are several statistics they quoted which I have suspected for a long time, but only now can confirm with numbers.
I can't begin to describe the frustration I feel when I'm forced to use Internet Explorer and clicking links causes pages to fire up in a million new windows. Whether or not a link opens in a new window, a new tab, or the current window/tab really should be a client-side choice. Webmasters think they're being helpful by letting you separate your workspace into many windows, but they're really just slowing people down. Thank God for Firefox.
This makes perfect sense. While colors, fonts and styles are pretty much standard in a cross-browser environment, due to many various interpretations of the CSS Box Model, coding layout purely in CSS can be a terrible chore. It's usually much quicker to do a few simply layouts in tables (header, sidebar, content) and use CSS for pretty much everything else.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Yeah, and what's the point of using HTML? They could have posted an image of the text to the same effect.
Ho hum for the life of a bear
Works for me. Firefox 1.5 and Opera 9 preview both display the graphs.
I've run some text through a free program before to create these. Some are funny, some are just silly, all formed from various Gutenberg texts and a few usenet love stories (text pr0n). Fairy tales, love stories and the bible make an interesting match;
and...
Actually I've got a really great idea for a program that would use text and markov chains. It's a little silly, but I wouldn't just give it out to anyone. E-mail me. It wouldn't be a project for the faint of heart and would require something like Google's cache of Internet pages (and Wikipedia content, Gutenberg content,
Get your Unix fortune now!
You'll probably need Opera, and it's Zoom feature, to be able to actually READ anything on those charts. The headers are microscopic, and the charts themselves not much bigger.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
On the other hand, you'd be amazed how many pages are called "Untitled Document" or "Page Title".
TITLE is more popular than BR as it's used to create the title of the page - the bit that appears in the browser's title bar. Just about every HTML document will have it. BR is just for line breaks and not necessarily needed (or even ideal in the days of CSS).
So no real surprise that it is more popular really.
The Opera 9 preview displays the graphs, but at a different scale than Firefox.
The summary got it wrong,
the study states that there are more pages using title, than pages using br. NOT that more title tags are used than br tags.
Approximatly 98% of all pages have a title tag and approximatly 7 out of 8 pages have (at least one, probably more) br tags.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
Opera and Firefox only support some bits of SVG. Currently released versions of Opera can't handle the SVG in the article, although the latest beta can.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
hit F5, the graphics are hella slow and sometimes don't load at first.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
HTML loads quickly, renders quickly in all browsers, and is more scalable than an image of the text. SVG has many of the same bonuses, but only a couple browsers support it, and nobody has complete support.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
My Firefox 1.5 is on XP, I'll bet your on Linux. I checked the Firefox bugzilla, someone reported a bug today referencing this same google site. Their behavior was different than mine; their graphs wouldn't show up until they did a Print Preview, but Firefox didn't crash. Further testing with my Firefox has crashed on many other SVGs.
My Opera is 8.51 and renders the graphs as black rectangles.
And I would like to express special thanks to the user who moderated my original comment as flaimbait, but without knowing who they are I cannot.
as far as I could see, this didn't compare the numbers of br but the amount of pages that contain br. if you compare numbers I'm sure there are more
than , but of course if you compare the number of pages that contain them then of course is more popular as it should be on every page.
this is clear because is ranked higher than which shouldn't be if they were counting elements instead of pages with elements
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
My Firefox 1.5 is on XP, I'll bet your on Linux.
Yes, but I just tried it on my XP box and it works there too. There must be something else going on.
How come the META tag didn't show how many times the "ROBOTS" name showed up?
This review is quite interesting (from a web dev's POV).
h tml suggests that I can stop worrying that perhaps Google finds even a smidge of value in this data.
There are also some handy little bits of info: Lists of most used attributes and tags could give an indication as to which tags Google will use and which will just be thrown out.
Statements like: "More pages use the completely worthless <meta> name="revisit-after"> than use the <em> element!"; appear to be dropped in on purpose as hints for less experienced devs. Similarly "Next we have two name values: keywords, which these days is mostly useless" on http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.
Then there's bits like "One area of future study would be to see what these attributes are used for: is onunload used mostly by Web applications for legitimate purposes, or is it used more by hostile sites to show pop-unders?" which suggest that if you're using onunload legitimately your pagerank is about to take a nose dive!!?
I'd not come across pingback and "link rev" before.
Thanks for all the fish.
My similar comment got moderated down as Flamebait, then Offtopic. Also I wonder if the Anonymous Coward with the Genius IQ who posted is also the moderator?
Agreed; I will try to figure it out what's wrong for the betterment of Firefox.
Is there something wrong with trying to encourage the masses to install SVG support in the browser? Is there anything wrong with the standard that implies that it should not come standard with browsers?
If your Firefox 1.5 doesn't display the graphs, or crashes, do the following as suggested by the Google webstats author:
8 1#c3
Apparently there's a problem in Firefox 1.5 regarding SVG images if you
had SVG in the registry. Try following the steps described here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3035
Thanks for the advice. Now that I'm at home, it loads just fine. Connection at work must have been slow.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
lol.
As other people pointed out, I meant the HTTP Link: header, not the HTML element.
But as to who wrote the study... well... I'm on the CSS working group. And the WHAT working group. Make of that what you will.
Actually, Mozilla has supported it for about 5 or 6 years now. Still, yeah, the other browsers, not so much. In fact it was dropped from the HTTP spec due to lack of implementations.
I did a (web developer plugin) "miscellaneous"->"small screen rendering" view switch for getting it to work. Using the svg urls directly also worked. It just didnt work out of the box as it should.
Actually the type pseudo-attribute is optional on ; see the errata.
10k is quite big, but not for an image that can be resolved infinitesimally.
Also, I suspect that if Google use mod_gzip (or whatever it's called) then the benefit of svgz wouldn't exist. The 10k was the size of the file stored on my comp: gzipped it's 1544k (so I assume that is the transmitted size).
Can't forget that second sign now. Who knows what damage you could cause? Posters might actually have to be original.
They're there affecting their effect.
Slashdotters shouldn't aim for writing for one person, but as many as possible.
Parent is doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing.
They're doing what led us into this shitty English situation in the first place; targetting specific people instead of the public.
Can anyone tell me what's here that can't be said in Chinese?
Even if it'd mean less understandability for the user, they should at least graciously fall back to a more popular language than English.
How does Parent's post look in Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, or Russian under default configurations?
If this is what Parent sometimes wishes to do, write comments to push a specific language, they're no better than Hitler.
You mean 1544 bytes of course.. :) But we all knew that.
I really can't wait for SVG to take over. So glad it's starting to get some respect...
"non-page-based device for the web"
something like a line that scrolled by, with user adjustable speed, so that an unlimited amount of text could be displayed in a small area? Like a super marquee? I like it. Used to own a speed reader trainer that did that (maxed it out eventually at 2400 WPM)
Theoretically most of the places where the BR tag is used it should be replaced with block elements like the P tag, and margins and/or padding specified in CSS where appropriate, but I've found a few spots on my own sites where I haven't been able to get consistent appearences between IE and other browsers without falling back on it.
Interesting point about the link header. As far as I remember, that's the preferred method to load a stylesheet, rather than @import.
By the way, I typed <br> 4 times in the course of writing this post. I won't taint my own website, but slashdot is fair game.
You actually have a billion points there.
Life's a bitch...
Or download a nightly build of Safari with SVG (for those who're not afraid of beta).
Except for the blind that need to browse the web with screenreaders. HTML 3 doesn't have the semantic tags that later versions of HTML brought.
/.. I mean, some of these quotes are actually smaller than the tags required to nest them.
Oh yes. Won't you think of the blind? And won't you think of the children?
I call shenanigans! Please tell me how using BR is going to mess things up for the blind, because I'm reading all of this with a screen reader, and it's working for me. Please don't simply chant the mantra, try and prove your point.
Yes, we all know that you're 1337 because you read the spec and you're quoting from it, but we're on a messageboard, it's not like a personal webpage. It's sort of idiotic to have to nest everything in verbose BLOCKQUOTE that requires paragraph nesting, just for a few sentences on
Oh, and then there's the box bugs in old browsers when you try to use DIV for layouts. So now you have all these boxes nested and they're going to create lots of weird gaps.
I love web development and CSS to death, but it seems like people just don't get when it's ok to break the rules, or they think it's semantic when their page validates.
Think of semantics like this: There needs to be a contrast between different elements. Maybe it would be best suited with BLOCKQUOTE (I wish we had HTML3's BQ), but as long as there's contrast between the elements, then it's not the end of the world. [DIV class=heading] is and example of little contrast, or rather, the contrast is not in the document.
Arguing about whether we should use BLOCKQUOTE or I is like arguing whether someone should have used a comma, or semicolon. Or should we say 32 semicolons vs 7 commas? Heck, you could accomplish the same thing by simply saying, "CRCulver said:" and "crabpeople said:", and I might do that if it was a small sentence.
An aural browser, presumably would read italic differently, just as my user CSS files are written to display italic differently. Any aural browser developer who doesn't do it that way is just stupid.
I just installed the Adobe plugin in a Mozilla 1.7.x tree and get the same effect. Sample SVGs that I find elsewhere on the web work fine, though.
Linux user since early January 1992.
Yes. It sucks.
I am so fed up with Google. They could as easily have done this with normal GIF, JPG, or PNGs. Of course, that's not so "cool", is it?
Now I have to have a certain version of a certain browser to look at some images? This forum would react very different had that company from Redmond done this.
It has nothing to do with "cool"; SVG happens to be easier for us to produce than bitmaps, and anyone who is going to be able to read this report and view graphics will be using an SVG-capable browser. The fact that it found bugs in every SVG browser out there is merely a bonus, it means that SVG support will get better.
We used standards. It's not our fault if there was only one released browser that supported those standards well enough for you to be able to see the graphics.
There's nothing wrong with encouraging. What's wrong is the fact that we're entirely excluded until some body out of our control includes it into the browser we use. And it's hardly standard if only a couple browsers are capable of displaying it, and (from what I hear) not very well either.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Amusignly, I'm also a licenced OmniWeb (sometimes) user. Until Safari came along, it was without question, the best browser by far for Mac OS X. When Safari picked up tabs, I switched and stayed away until about the OW 5.0 timeframe. Since then I switch between OmniWeb and Safari on and off and keep my bookmarks in del.icio.us.
I also think it's fantastic that the OmniGroup releases their basic frameworks as open source. Very nice gesture to the community.
1 billion pages! Talk about a violation of privacy! The justice department is only asking for a random sample of 1 million addresses and the search results for any 1 week period. This guy gets access to 1 billion pages via the google repository (whatever that is), conducts detailed analysis of the contents of those pages, and nary a word of dissent from the vast Slashdot audience.
::chuckle:: ;0)>