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#HTML thread. I love @HTTPArchive’s 2019 Almanac—this is excellent data for all of us. I’m still reviewing but in this thread I wish to share some impressions from the Almanac’s markup chapter (almanac.httparchive.org/en/2019/markup).
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@HTTPArchive The top elements look like there’s less presentational markup. Fewer layout tables, fewer line breaks for layout purposes. That looks great—but the dominant “2nd paradigm” we’re in (cf. meiert.com/en/blog/two-paradigms/) suggests it’s now worse #CSS-wise. (I look forward to the CSS data.)
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@HTTPArchive The increase in number of different elements per page suggests better (but still not good!) knowledge of HTML. Although I still deem HTML rather poorly understood (cf. the intro for amazon.com/dp/B07ZNSZX49/), such development would of course be great.
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@HTTPArchive Side note: Through all HTML incarnations, there should be around 170 (not 145) elements—compare with the continuously updated index at meiert.com/en/indices/html-elements/. I suspect that—for understandable reason!—XHTML 2.0 was ignored? Randomly asking @Una, @briankardell, and @tomayac.
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@HTTPArchive @Una @briankardell @tomayac For deprecated elements, then, I find it quite surprising that
marquee
is still comparatively popular—and striking that it’s even more popular on mobile than on desktop. (Is this real?) -
@HTTPArchive @Una @briankardell @tomayac This: “There are around two billion web sites on the web. If something appears on 0.1% of all websites in our dataset, we can extrapolate that this represents perhaps two million web sites in the whole web. [This is why removing support for elements is a very rare occurrence.]”
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@HTTPArchive @Una @briankardell @tomayac With other popular elements also meaning
jdiv
,cufon
, orymaps
, we—and I want to call this one out specifically—find both irresponsible markup by vendors (cf. ancient meiert.com/en/blog/how-to-share-code-with-users/), and unprofessional conduct by developers (validation is more modern than ever). -
@HTTPArchive @Una @briankardell @tomayac “There are also lots of accordions, dialogs, at least 65 variants of carousels, lots of stuff about popups, at least 27 variants of toggles and switches, and so on.” This number seems really low, and is yet really interesting. Maybe we reinvent the wheel *too rarely*.
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@HTTPArchive The top elements (fig. 7) suggest “maybe not,” maybe there *isn’t* any more #HTML knowledge going around. Only 11 elements on >90% of pages? And
b
is in the Top 10? (i
would have made more sense, semantically and typographically!) With HTML’s 112 elements, this is bad news.