The ninth, tenth, and eleventh most used elements in our sample
were table, td, and
tr. Table elements:
First, we are a little concerned. In our data sample there were
twice as many pages that used the table element but
didn't use the td element, than there were
pages that used the samp element. For every page that
you can find that uses the samp element, we can find
two that use the table element in a
completely bogus fashion!
Our initial thought was that maybe this was cases like the Geocities footer:
</object></layer></div></span></style></noscript></table></script></applet>
...but that isn't it, because our analysis only counted start
tags, not end tags. If someone can explain why so many pages would
use a <table> tag and then not put any cells in
it, please let us know.
There's not much surprise in the attributes; as we all know,
HTML tables are mostly abused for layout purposes, and this is
clearly visible in the fact that all but one of the thirty five
most commonly used table-related attributes are presentational
(well, we could argue that class="",
id="", colspan="", and
rowspan="" were being used for semantic purposes, but
who are we trying to kid here?).
The onmouseover and onmouseout
attributes are seen on td elements; in fact the
td element is the second most likely element to see
these event handler attributes, after a and before
img and div.
The count of
caption/thead/tfoot elements
probably represents the cases of non-presentational tables. The
tbody elements are probably mostly from authoring
tools that are internally written to support HTML, and therefore
output the implied tbody elements explicitly. I have
no explanation for the relatively high number of th
elements.
Some of the semantic attributes on the table elements
are used. The table element sees the
summary attribute quite a bit, considering (though we
have not checked how many of them simply say "Layout table, two
columns, menu in the first column, content in the second" or some
such). Also, although it isn't shown on the graphs above, the
td element sees the headers,
scope and abbr attributes sometimes too
(and the last two are also sometimes seen on th as
well). There was no measurable use of the axis
attribute, though.
Typos were quite common; the td element, for
example, had more pages with widht,
witdh, aling, valing,
with, and heigth attributes than it had
pages with headers attributes.
Also common were misplaced attributes; again looking at
td we see alt, face, and
size attributes (possibly useful on other elements but
certainly not td). There were also cases of "What were
you thinking?", most notably <td wrap=""> (was
nowrap intended?), and <td span="">
(colspan maybe?).