<script> elementThe script element was used on roughly half the
pages we checked. The most common attributes:
There really is no reason for using language these
days. It's been deprecated since forever, and quite obviously a lot
of people can't spell it. And given that more than half of pages
specify the type attribute anyway... this is probably
mostly a matter of "just in case" cargo-cult authoring. (It's worth
noting that in
the current HTML5 proposals, the language
attribute is gone, leaving only type, and that that is
being made optional, defaulting to
text/javascript.)
Lots of src: more than half the pages we examined
apparently use external scripts somewhere.
That's it as far as popular attributes go. In the rarely-used
bucket, we have mostly IE-specific things. The defer
attribute, currently implemented only by IE (to our knowledge), is
underdefined in HTML4. There have been proposals for dropping it in
HTML5, but apparently it is used, so maybe instead the
specification will have to describe what it actually means
(exactly). The for and event attributes
are IE extensions similar to XML Events (although simpler). It is
interesting that they are used at all. fptype is a
FrontPage extension.
It would be interesting (though quite hard) to examine the uses
of charset to determine how many of them were wrong or
redundant. The aforementioned proposals for HTML5 don't mention the
charset attribute currently; if the attribute is used
for good reason, though, it may have to be added.