- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 20:56:33 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Karl Dubost <karl@w3.org>
- Cc: www-qa@w3.org
On Fri, 29 Sep 2006, Karl Dubost wrote: > > It is why I have asked more details to Ian Hickson, because I really > think it is as much important as the derived statistics which have been > published in the [previous survey][1]. When the sample is not given or > clearly identified it is really difficult to draw meaningful > conclusions. This is absolutely true. This is why the survey(s) haven't been published formally; due to the nature of the way in which the results were obtained, I can't write a scientific report. The data was collected for the purposes of helping WHATWG's spec development work (I think all specifications should be written based on solid research of authoring practices, etc), and I consider the data to be suitably representative for that purpose. For other purposes, the data probably isn't useful as anything other than an idle curiosity, and I would not recommend treating it as anything but that. If you would like a more formal survey of the Web, I recommend comissioning your own. :-) > - DOCTYPE I'm not sure how you would define this; take this document, for instance: http://damowmow.com/playground/html-or-xml.html What's the DOCTYPE? How about this one: http://damowmow.com/playground/html-or-xml.xml What's the DOCTYPE? If your answer was different for the two pages, then why was it different? The two pages are byte-for-byte identical. If your answer was the same, then why were they the same? Browsers treat the two very differently. (This is why my survey mostly ignored the DOCTYPE and instead just assumed HTML5 parsing rules.) -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Friday, 29 September 2006 20:56:45 UTC