A Statistical Review of 1 Billion Web Pages

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A Statistical Review of 1 Billion Web Pages

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @08:41AM 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!"

19 of 294 comments (clear)

Blink by suso · 2006-01-25 08:44 · Score: 4, Funny

the tag.
1. Re:Blink by ReverendLoki · 2006-01-25 09:47 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  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.
  
  --
  09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
is more popular than by InsideTheAsylum · 2006-01-25 08:46 · Score: 5, Funny

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.
1. Re: is more popular than by aussie_a · 2006-01-25 08:54 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Never been scared your girlfriend was pregnant? Oh wait, this is slashdot. Nevermind.
2. Re: is more popular than by Anonymous Coward · 2006-01-25 10:42 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Women and Compilers... miss a period and they go wild.
Finally... by RandoX · 2006-01-25 08:46 · Score: 5, Funny

An un-slashdottable server.
BR tag? by p0 · 2006-01-25 08:46 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Not complete by Anonymous Coward · 2006-01-25 08:47 · Score: 5, Funny

It didn't have everything of course. Some elements were censored on behalf of the Chinese government.
\. shows up in the Web Authoring Statistics by digitaldc · 2006-01-25 08:52 · Score: 4, Funny

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
1. Re:\. shows up in the Web Authoring Statistics by shrikel · 2006-01-25 08:59 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  You're confused. Backslashdot is across the street.
  (sheesh)
  
  --
  Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Re:what's the point of a 1 billion page sample? by Anonymous Coward · 2006-01-25 08:53 · Score: 5, Informative

You get a decrease of the variance of the mean.
Best bash I've seen in a long time: by Benanov · 2006-01-25 08:53 · Score: 4, Funny

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:what's the point of a 1 billion page sample? by Durinthal · 2006-01-25 08:55 · Score: 5, Insightful

If you can have a larger sample, why not use it? It's more accurate that way.
Re:No GOTOs? by the+computer+guy+nex · 2006-01-25 09:00 · Score: 4, Funny

How about:

IF(Post=Old_And_Tired) GOTO Mod_Down
Ad for anti-IE by jamienk · 2006-01-25 09:01 · Score: 4, Insightful

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!
Opera also supports SVG by TheJavaGuy · 2006-01-25 09:15 · 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.
table with no by saigon_from_europe · 2006-01-25 09:32 · 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.
The reason not to do this by winkydink · 2006-01-25 09:37 · 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
Re:Dumb by Spad · 2006-01-25 10:24 · Score: 4, Insightful

It's even dumber to state that someone is presenting pictures with Flash when they're actually using SVG.