Re: [css3-images] linear-gradient keywords and angles are opposite

On Jun 8, 2011, at 7:08 PM, Sylvain Galineau wrote:

> If this is going to break the web,
> it should be easy to provide plenty of evidence, for one. 

I don't have a good way of quantifying how many style sheets are using linear-gradient with degrees in existing style sheets. But just FYI, here is what I did find:

I did a Google code search, but that only checks in public repositories. It found 260 cases of css files containing "moz-linear-gradient" and "deg" notation there[1]. Presumably, most of those files also contain other variations of prefixed gradients. 

The same search, but without limiting it to just degree notation, finds 5,658 cases of css files containing "moz-linear-gradient"[2]. So that is about 4.6% using the degree notation, with the rest using side keywords or defaults. A search for all CSS files in Google Code Search results in 38,000 results[3]. So, according to that, a little less than 15% of all css code files in repositories that Google Code Search knows about are using some form of -moz-linear-gradient(). That is more than I expected, but perhaps it has to do with the type of things posted in public repositories.

If I search the general Web via regular Google for "-moz-linear-gradient" in CSS files, but  it seems to only find results in CSS files that are actually structured as HTML files. That search turned up 24,000 results.[4] If the 4.6% were applied to these samples too, then we could guess that about 1,100 of them use degree notation. 

By comparison, the total number of filetype:css files that Google indexes with "color" in them (structured as HTML files, as those with  "-moz-linear-gradient were) is 659,000 [5]. So if we assume that virtually all css files have "color" in them, then that would mean about 3.5% of all CSS files use "-moz-linear-gradient". Perhaps we could round that down to 3% to be a little conservative.

The total number of filetype:css files that Google is aware of is 1,720,000, but that is not restricted to just HTML-formatted CSS files[6]. So, if 3% of those are using "-moz-linear-gradient", that would be about 51,600 files. If 4.6% of those are using degree notation, that would be about 2,373 files.

I realize that a lot of this is based on some possibly questionable assumptions, but I don't know another way to estimate this sort of thing. I don't have access to the CSS search engine that Opera came out with a couple years ago for finding this kind of info more directly.[7]


[1] http://www.google.com/codesearch#search/&q=moz-linear-gradient%5C(%5Cs*%5B%5C.%5Cd-%5D%2Bdeg%20lang:%5Ecss$%20file:.css&type=css

[2] http://www.google.com/codesearch#search/&q=moz-linear-gradient%5C(%20lang:%5Ecss$%20file:.css&type=css

[3] http://www.google.com/codesearch#search/&q=lang:%5Ecss$%20file:.css&type=css

[4] http://www.google.com/search?q=%22-moz-linear-gradient%22%20filetype:css

[5] http://www.google.com/search?q=%22color%22+filetype:css

[6] http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype:css

[7] http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2008/10/15/ and http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-key-findings/#css