Re: Breaking out Headers, Footers and Navigation

On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Tantek [ISO-8859-1] Çelik wrote:
>
> The problem is one of data.  To properly design additional sets of tags
> to add to HTML (XHTML M12N modules), there needs to be a good study of
> what semantic authors are doing today.  And just sending out a survey
> won't get you the right information either -- you'll get responses
> indicating what people *think* they want, rather than what they'll
> actually use.  Looking at de facto class names is a much better
> indicator of what new semantics authors are actually *using* today.

Do you know of any such studies? (Has the HTML working group done anything
like this?)

This information would indeed be very useful. The problem is coming up
with a representative sample of the Web to analyse, and then finding the
time to actually do it. You can't really automate this since what you
really want to know is "what are people using divs for". The closest you
could probably get is "what class names do people use the most" but that
isn't exactly perfect.

-- 
Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
U+1047E                                         /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/                         `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 19 April 2004 12:03:42 UTC