GoLive's footprints are all over the Web. A scary number of
pages use <table gridx="" gridy="" showgridx=""
showgridy="">, not to mention the multitude of
<csscriptdict>,
<csactiondict>, and <csobj>
elements.
GoLive is of course far from the only offender. There are more
<o:p> elements (from Microsoft Office) on the
Web than there are <h6> elements. There are also
plenty of <x-claris-window>,
<x-claris-tagview>, and
<x-sas-window> elements (from Claris Homepage,
we presume). Apparently Actinic, a British company that produces
e-commerce solutions, has software that is now quite widely
deployed , too: <actinic:basehref>,
<actinic:section>,
<actinic:nowserving>, and
<actinic:curraccount> elements litter the
Web. Macromedia join in the fun as well, with
<mm:endlock> and
<mm:beginlock> elements found on a number of
pages (the former somewhat more than the latter, oddly). NetObjects
Fusion is the source of a startling number of nof=""
attributes on many elements (not quite enough to hit any of the
"popular attributes" charts, but hiding just below the fold of the
table, body, img,
td and a elements' tables).
Some of the more obscure cases of non-standard tags we found
include a series of tags with the st1: prefix, such as
<st1:city>, and
<st1:placetype>,
<st1:country-region>,
<st1:state>, which we are told come from
Microsoft Office ("smarttags"). Those four tags are used more often
than the ins and del elements from HTML4
(and there are others).
Of interest to the SVG crowd may be the fact that all of the
elements mentioned so far are more popular than IE's
VML. <v:stroke> is the most popular VML element,
followed by <v:shape>,
<v:shapetype>, <v:path>,
<v:f>, <v:formulas>,
<v:imagedata>, and
<v:fill>. The last of those is only used about
40% as often as the first one. (There's actually a
v:shape attribute that is used on div
elements a lot more than the v:foo
elements, as well.)
Certain individual sites use custom markup that appeared on the
radar, too: the New York Times, for instance, with, for example,
their <NYT_COPYRIGHT> element.
The good thing, if we can be forgiven for trying to remain optimistic in the face of all this non-standard markup, is that at least these elements are all clearly using vendor-specific names. This massively reduces the likelihood that standards bodies will invent elements and attributes that clash with any of them.