[minutes] XHTML and MIME types

Just to give some quantitative basis to the discussion
on XHTML: the most recent large-scale study of
browsing on the Internet is the MAMA project by Opera
(many quite interesting reports at section "Opera" of 
http://dev.opera.com/articles).

Here are relevant results.

URL analyzed: 		3509180

Declared MIME types (percentages of URL):

text/html:		3505990 (99,91%)
application/xhtml+xml:	935 (0,027%)

Out of the URL analyzed, 1788294 had a DOCTYPE 
(50,96%), thus unambiguously identifying the markup
(percentages of DOCTYPES):

HTML (2, 3, 3.2, 4.0):	1189097 (66,49%)
XHTML (1.0, 1.1, 2):	569283 (31,83%)
other:			45046 (2,52%)

>From this, one infers a lower bound of 99,84% for the
proportion of documents that are unambigously XHTML 
markup but not advertised as application/xhtml+xml.

Sources:
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-basic-document-structure
http://devfiles.myopera.com/articles/570/doctype-ci-url.htm
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-http-headers
http://devfiles.myopera.com/articles/554/mamaurlset-mimehistogram.htm

E.Casais


      

Received on Wednesday, 7 January 2009 22:06:44 UTC