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!"

Comments

I clicked I'm Feeling Lucky on this article

[dada21]

and all I got was Britney Spears.

Sheesh.

We've come a long way

[suso]

if the tag isn't on the top elements list.

Blink

[suso]

the tag.

Re:Blink

[mysqlrocks]

the <blink> tag.

I must have blinked, I didn't see it the first time.

Re:Blink

[ReverendLoki]

Still, the only good use I ever saw for that tag was the line:

Schrodinger's cat is <blink>not</blink> dead.

Every other usage just caused me to browse elsewhere.

Re:Blink

[Repton]

All you need to do is blink at the right frequency and you'll never see it at all!

is more popular than

[InsideTheAsylum]

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.

Re: is more popular than

[Fr05t]

"...out."

Hooray! I've never been so happy to see a period!

Re: is more popular than

[aussie_a]

Never been scared your girlfriend was pregnant? Oh wait, this is slashdot. Nevermind.

Re: is more popular than

[Anonymous Coward]

Women and Compilers... miss a period and they go wild.

Re: is more popular than

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations.
Is it yours?

Finally...

[RandoX]

An un-slashdottable server.

Not complete

[Anonymous Coward]

It didn't have everything of course. Some elements were censored on behalf of the Chinese government.

well this is new

[Abstract_Me]

we haven't slashdotted the google server... but it would appear that the firefox download site for extensions is.

\. shows up in the Web Authoring Statistics

[digitaldc]

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.

Re:\. shows up in the Web Authoring Statistics

[shrikel]

You're confused. Backslashdot is across the street.

(sheesh)

Best bash I've seen in a long time:

[Benanov]

From TFA, the classes page:

The rest of the top 20 classes are either presentational or otherwise meaningless (msonormal, for example, which is one of the classes that Microsoft Office uses in its "HTML" output).

Re:No GOTOs?

[the computer guy nex]

How about:

IF(Post=Old_And_Tired) GOTO Mod_Down

Re:BR tag?

[crumley]

But don't we all use br's when we quote other people on slashdot?

No.

Re:One thing that screws up web page studies

[Anonymous Coward]

aaaarrrrggghhhhh!

I just changed the results... now he has to redo all those pretty colors...

Re:Worst use of SVG ever

[jamesots]

Yeah, and what's the point of using HTML? They could have posted an image of the text to the same effect.