The ten elements used on the most pages, and the twenty attributes that the most pages use with those elements:
Most people (roughly 98%) include head,
html, title and body
elements. This is somewhat ironic, since three of those four
elements are optional in HTML. It's interesting to see that most
pages have a title, though.
The most-used element other than those four is the
a element. Almost all pages that have an
a element specify the href attribute on
an a element somewhere, and more than half of
pages use the target attribute on the
a element somewhere.
The next most used element is the img element, with
three quarters of all pages using the deprecated
border attribute on at least one of img
element, and around 24% of pages that use img elements
not specifing alt attributes on any of their
images.
The next most-frequently-featured element is meta,
followed by br. The img,
meta and br elements are each present on
roughly the same number of pages.
The table element, along with td and
tr (not shown above), are the ninth, tenth, and
eleventh most frequently used elements respectively.
It seems most pages use presentational attributes: the fourth
most used attribute across all elements is the table
element's border attribute, followed by the
height and width attributes on
img, followed by <table width="">,
<table cellspacing="">, <img
border="">, and <table
cellpadding="">. Interestingly, though, the most frequently
used attribute on the body element (namely
bgcolor) is only used on around half of pages, with
all the other presentational attributes on body being
used even less. One possible explanation is that on average, colors
are mostly done using CSS, while layout is mostly done using HTML
tables.