Re: Final thoughts on <q>

Daniel Glazman wrote:
> 
> Justin James wrote:
> 
>> Frankly, since <q> is so rarely used
> 
> That is an assumption I would like to see stats about. Most people
> I know here in France and who write pro docs in HTML use <q>.
> Some blog systems allow to encapsulate a text selection into a <q>.
> 
> I'd really like to see stats about <q>, global and per language.
> I'm not saying <q> is one of the most used elements in HTML, but I
> think it's going to be really painful to some authors or online apps
> if <q> is dropped. Deprecate it and I'm fine ; drop it and I disagree.
> 
> </Daniel>

Out of 126989 pages from dmoz.org some months ago, I see <q> on 59 
pages. Grouping by TLD, showing number-of-pages-with-<q> / 
total-number-of-pages-from-TLD, I have:

   com: 17 / 56401
    de:  8 / 10451
  info:  1 / 589
    it:  1 / 3638
    jp:  2 / 3286
   net:  4 / 5281
    no:  1 / 391
    nz:  1 / 469
   org: 14 / 10420
    uk:  9 / 6327
    za:  1 / 243

The fr TLD has 2266 pages in the sample, so if it followed the average 
then I'd expect 1.1 fr pages with <q>, which is close enough to the 
data. But since the element is so rarely used, the noise in the data 
makes it impossible to determine much from this sample (other than to 
determine that it's rarely used among the pages from dmoz.org (which is 
at least roughly representative of the wider web)).

http://philip.html5.org/data/q-tags.txt has the lines from pages with 
<q> tags, in case anyone wants to see specifically how it's used in 
practice.

-- 
Philip Taylor
pjt47@cam.ac.uk

Received on Thursday, 30 October 2008 13:44:17 UTC