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A Statistical Review of 1 Billion Web Pages

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the demanding-a-recount dept.

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!"

8 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. Re:what's the point of a 1 billion page sample? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You get a decrease of the variance of the mean.

  2. Opera also supports SVG by TheJavaGuy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  3. table with no by saigon_from_europe · · Score: 4, Informative
    From the article:
    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.
    I don't know if they counted dynamic pages, but I guess they did. In dynamic pages, an empty table is quite normal.

    Your code usually goes like this:
    <table>
    <% for each element in collection %>
    <tr><td> something </td></tr>
    <% end for %>
    </table>

    So it is quite easy to get the empty table if the collection is empty.
    --
    No sig today.
  4. The reason not to do this by winkydink · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  5. Re:Ad for anti-IE by Bogtha · · Score: 3, Informative

    written by a major FF developer

    I don't believe Ian Hickson has been involved with Firefox; if I remember correctly, he used to hack on Mozilla, but then started work at Opera before Firefox took off.

    I don't think it's a jab at Internet Explorer, it's just that he knows that the target audience is likely to have a decent browser, so he's used the features likely to be available.

    --
    Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
  6. For folks does not (want) to run Firefox by Ilgaz · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html got suitable plugins for browsers/OS of choice.

    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 .ogg. Rootless promotion of this kind...

  7. Re:BR tag? is used in 7 out of 8 pages by TekGoNos · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  8. Fix for Firefox 1.5 by bigbadbuccidaddy · · Score: 3, Informative

    If your Firefox 1.5 doesn't display the graphs, or crashes, do the following as suggested by the Google webstats author:

    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=30358 1#c3