Google code webstats
February 25th, 2006 by Sonja DuijvesteijnIn december of 2005 Google did a major test on over a billion sites to check which elements are used most. The results are quite interesting.
Tables
It is interesting to see how often ‘table’ is used. In fact, it is the 9th most used element on the web. And, on those table elements (including td and tr) mostly styling attributes are used. So, that means, eventhough the standards clearly say that tables “SHOULD” not but used for layout, that most of the developers aren’t bothered by standards at all.
Body
Out of the top 20 attributes used for the body only 9 are valid, and 5 have in fact been deprecated for over 8 years already. Since the major development in the last eight years this can’t be legacy pages. Why do people use “margin-width” on the body element?
Used elements
They also checked to see how many elements were used on a average page. This number was 19. The 19 most used elements are : <head> <html> <title> <body> <a> <img> <meta> <br> <table> <td> <tr> <p> <script> <div> <b> <font> <link> <form> <input>. The number of occurances of these elements are in that same order. So, again, this shows that table is used a lot more often than div’s. In fact, according to the statistics there are about 25% more pages that use tables than div’s.
Also, the br tag is used more frequently than the p. While in most cases p would be semantically correct.
I decided to check this site and see how many elements I’ve used, and wether that matches the 19 most popular ones. <html> <head> <link> <meta> <title> <link> <body> <div> <ul> <li> <a> <h2> <small> <p> <h3> <blockquote> <br /> <pre> <code> <acronym> <ol> <img> <form> <input> <span> In contrast to the results from google mine are not put in any order, except that in which they appear on the first page of this site.
When comparing these two list it is apparent that I use a lot of less common elements on this site (and that I skipped the h1 totally for some mysterious reason, which seems like something that needs fixing.) But also that 5 of the most common elements aren’t used at all, namely :<table> <tr> <td> <font> <script>. Font is in fact deprecated and should not be used anymore. And I have no need for a table on this site so there is none. The script tag is the one thing that I see uses for on this page, and it is no mystery as to why it is so popular on other pages.
To read the rest of the results see Google webstats.
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