Re: HTML/XHTML usage survey

* Karl Dubost wrote:
>I would like to know if someone has been curious enough to know to push 
>a bit further by analyzing this:
>
>  * Statistical Quantitative analysis  (automatic)
>      - Which HTML elements are used in Web pages?
>      - Which frequency ?
>      - Are valid Web pages richer than non-valid ones.
>        (bigger varieties of HTML element)
>      - The same for attribute

This does not seem all that interesting to me, http://www.google.com
and http://www.amazon.com/ have too little in common to compare them
in a meaningful way. http://validator.w3.org/detailed.html for example
could be seen as much "richer" than http://www.webstandards.org as it
uses table, tr, th, td, form, input, select, label, and fieldset, none
of which is used on <http://www.webstandards.org>, but it actually is
not, at least not due to this difference. You would need to ask more
interesting, more specific questions to get meaningful answers.

>  * Qualitative analysis (human)
>      - Are the elements and the attributes used appropriately?
>      - Is it NOT possible to define the proper use?

It is possible to define proper use, but determining proper use through
reliable human-testing is at least very difficult, about as difficult as
to determine whether a HTML/XHTML document meets the requirements of the
relevant specifications due to W3C's failure to provide and maintain
sufficient quality of these specifications. To an extend where W3C Team
members start projects and W3C Working Groups charter themselves to fill
these gaps with Guidelines, Best Practise documents, and modified
document formats.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Thursday, 6 January 2005 05:53:16 UTC