Google statistics over HTML usage

Google Code has done extensive research over the use of HTML today. Since this is Google doing the job they had access to an enormous amount of data, over a billion documents where analysed. What does the report conclude? Pretty much what we already know: people don't use HTML for structure like its intended.

Here are some examples of strange usage in the report:

  • <head> is used more often than <html>. No comment.
  • <table> is the ninth most used element. I have serious doubts that this is due to the amount of tabular data on the web.
  • The third most used classname is "title" and the fourth "small". The first could probably be replaced by a header tag, the other one should certainly be set by CSS since it's style.
  • Half of all <body> elements contains the "bgcolor" attribute. If this isn't style, what is?

The report tells a lot about the shape of the web. If I only could get more people to read my beginners guide