- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 00:33:23 +0200 (EET)
- To: "'www-html@w3.org'" <www-html@w3.org>
On Fri, 24 Mar 2006, Ian Hickson wrote: > According to my studies it's used in around 0.1% of the Web's pages. One > in every thousand pages isn't bad, given how few pages could be expected > to be defining terms; In particular, it's used more than <ins>, <del>, > <var>, <samp>, <bdo>, etc. I can't argue with your statistics - the Google analysis http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/elements.html does not cover the <dfn> element. But I think I have almost never seen <dfn> used anywhere except on my own pages and on sites like W3C (and tutorials that describe the <dfn> element and illustrate its use) - and I have read other people's HTML code quite a lot. Assuming that the figure 0.1% is representative, is it small or large as compared with the expected frequency of pages that actually contain definitions of terms? After all, what matters - for purposes like developing browsers and search engines - is the probability that you can actually locate defining occurrences by looking at markup for them (at present, <dfn> and <dt>). Even if you get a large amount of information that way, is it enough if it is just a small fraction of pages that actually define things? -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Friday, 24 March 2006 22:33:32 UTC