Re: Dropping <input usemap="">

Robert Burns wrote:
> On Aug 15, 2007, at 4:36 AM, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>> [...]
>> These are the kinds of possibilities you could look for.
>>
>> * Sites that use <input usemap> for legitimate use cases.
> 
> I think the fact that this is not implemented in an interoperable way 
> already suggests the existence or non-existence of evidence like that is 
> useless. We might as well be looking for evidence of the <element-I 
> -just-made-up> is used appropriately and for legitimate use-cases. A 
> poorly implemented feature from HTML 4.01 has little more likelihood of 
> existing in the wild than that element.

The data at 
<http://canvex.lazyilluminati.com/survey/2007-07-17/analyse.cgi/index> 
suggests that (0.8+/-0.2)% of the 4.5 million pages listed on dmoz.org 
use <blink>. That has about the same level of support as <input usemap> 
(it works in Netscape/Firefox but not in IE) and degrades in the same 
way (it just gets ignored), but <blink> is used two thousand times more 
than <input usemap> (given the "0.00036%" from Hixie's data). 
<element-I-just-made-up> is used in zero pages. The differences in the 
likelihoods of existing in the wild are significant.


(From the same data, <map> is on (13.2+/-0.8)% of pages, and <img 
usemap> is on about the same number, and <img ismap> is on (1.2+/-0.3)% 
of pages. So client-side and server-side image maps are both quite 
common on <img>, but client-side image maps are forty thousand times 
rarer on <input>. (Unfortunately I didn't collect any data on how much 
<input type=image> there is).)

-- 
Philip Taylor
philip@zaynar.demon.co.uk

Received on Wednesday, 15 August 2007 12:56:13 UTC