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

Re:what's the point of a 1 billion page sample?

[Anonymous Coward]

You get a decrease of the variance of the mean.

Opera also supports SVG

[TheJavaGuy]

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.

table with no

[saigon_from_europe]

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.

The reason not to do this

[winkydink]

Capitalization makes all the difference in the sentence:

i helped my uncle jack off a horse