- From: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:58:17 +0100
- To: Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- CC: Geoffrey Sneddon <foolistbar@googlemail.com>, public-html@w3.org
Robert Burns wrote: > > On Aug 16, 2007, at 8:31 AM, James Graham wrote: > >> >>> On 16 Aug 2007, at 04:40, Robert Burns wrote: >> >> [...] >> >> From a scientific perspective, saying I searched a >>>> cache that I have, that you can't search and I won't even show you >>>> the code that produces that cache , would be the same as me saying >>>> the following. "I have this 8-ball and when I ask it if we should >>>> drop @usamap from |input| it tells me 'not likely'. You may say that >>>> sure, 8-balls say that But the odd part is that it says that every >>>> time [cue eerie music]." :-) The point though is that it can't be >>>> reproducible at all if its all based on hidden data and methods. >> >> It's neither based on hidden data nor a hidden method. The data is all >> publicly accessible webpages. The methodology is a) spider the >> webpages, b) run the parsing algorithms in the html 5 spec over the >> resulting files c) extract whatever data is of interest. That seems >> in-principle pretty straight forward to me and at-least as >> reproducible as many peer reviewed scientific studies. Indeed Phillip >> Taylor has already managed to reproduce the procedure on a smaller >> dataset and thus independently verified many of Hixie's results. > > Which results are you referring to here. Ian looked for misused <input > usemap> elements. Philip looked for <blink> and <element-I just-mad-up> > on another data set. The couldn't reproduce the same results because > they were looking for different things. I meant, more generally, that the two different surveys they did have produced similar results for questions like "what fraction of pages use the <foo> element?" rather than questions specifically related to <input usemap>. IIRC Phillip didn't find any use of <input usemap> (which you would predict from the the small usage found by Hixie and the relative number of pages in the two surveys). -- "Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?" -- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Received on Thursday, 16 August 2007 13:58:39 UTC