The Meaning of Scale

I’m quite a numbers person and have something of a penchant for statistics As if you couldn’t guess from the site name. So it is with Google (who also have a mathematical inspired site name). But unlike me they have more people (it’s just me) and lets face it, more computing power (only so many computers I can get in my house without getting told off).

So they bring us something of a large, automated, study (including some decent analysis) of what markup is actually being used, interestingly also including common class names. I’d love to do something like that – over 1,000,000,000 sites analysed!

On a standards front seems to be good news and bad news, some of the common classes are things like:

Most of those I can see use for. They Mean something for a start. Although some of the other top entries included things such as:

Which maybe aren’t as well chosen.

On the other hand there are still lots of weirdness, proprietary tags and bizarre attributes. iWeb might be using crazy nested divs but it’s still valid.

Being Google it’s all written fairly amusingly, including a few digs at competitors with applications which generate nightmare markup. Overall, a good read. There are probably a good number of other useful nuggets of information burried in the document as well. Anyone coming across anything of particular relevance leave a comment.