MAMA: Tables

By Brian Wilson

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Index:

1. Introduction
2. How deeply are tables nested?
3. TABLE element
4. TD and TH elements
5. TR element
6. TBODY, THEAD and TFOOT elements
7. CAPTION element
8. COL and COLGROUP elements

Introduction

Tables have a bad reputation among the markup purists in the development community, because many authors often use them for presentation purposes. Tables generally increase the complexity of documents and can make them more difficult to maintain. Authors do not really see these factors as significant drawbacks though, judging by the overwhelming popularity of tables for layout. In practice, the use of presentation-only tables by authors is what makes the main table-related elements some of the most popular sub-elements of BODY, after the A and IMG elements. The most frequently occurring of these is the TABLE element, found in 2,894,184 of MAMA's URLs (82.47%).

Usage of the table elements

Authors have a definite preference for the table elements they use. Almost every table uses the TABLE, TR and TD elements. All of the other elements are used rarely by comparison. The CAPTION, COL, THEAD, COLGROUP, and TFOOT elements are all used in less than 1% of TABLE occurrences.

Use of table elements together in the same page

Looking at the cases where the major table elements are used in the same document, there are thousands of instances where they are not used together. This is low considering the overall sample size. Keep in mind, that this measure only counts usage anywhere in a document—not usage together nor even correct usage. The true numbers here are likely higher as a consequence. One wonders, for example, why a TABLE would ever exist without any TD or TH elements. Leftover markup? Authoring ignorance? The plot thickens....

How deeply are tables nested?

One of the features requested for MAMA was the ability to detect deeply-nested tables. Such structures can be excellent stress tests for a browser. In theory, every TABLE open tag should have a corresponding closing tag. As MAMA traversed a document, any TABLE open tags added 1 to the current depth counter. A closing TABLE tag would subtract 1 from the depth counter. When the depth counter hit a new high score for the document, that value became the new "maximum table depth". This rather simplistic system yielded a number for a document's "maximum table nesting depth"—it does not necessarily mean that the open and closing tags are properly nested; that is another issue entirely. The result here may be esoteric, but can still provide some entertainment.

The maximum nesting depth discovered was a rather astounding 745 deep at http://www.artsforeveryone.com/, with the next-nearest depth being 495 in a case where tables syntax was used very poorly. The average nesting depth when tables were used was 2.77. The full frequency table is also available.

TABLE element

This wrapper element for table structures is (naturally) the most popular of its type. It ranks #8 overall in element popularity, used in 82.47% of all MAMA's URLs. Many attributes were detected for this element, only some of which are in the standards. A few of the attributes are VERY popular with authors—Border, Width, Cellpadding, and Cellspacing are used in ~90% of all URLs that use tables. Other, less popular detected attributes are either apparently bogus (such as Cool and Celpadding) or editor extensions (like the numerous Adobe GoLive attributes Gridx/Gridy, Showgridx/Showgridy and Usegridx/Usegridy).

The Frame attribute

This attribute for the TABLE element was first specified in HTML 4.0, and its adoption rate has not been very high—MAMA only found 9,945 URLs using it (0.34% of cases using the TABLE element). Officially, it takes one of 9 discrete values, and, as expected, they are the most popular ones. What never fails to surprise is how creative authors can be—MAMA noted 70 different total values for this attribute (some of which are listed in the full frequency table). The top value specifies no border at all, and the next most popular is a complete border—the main purpose of this attribute was to give authors more control over table borders than just a simple on/off setting, but it seems that is how authors use this attribute.

The Rules attribute

This is a companion attribute to the Frame attribute covered in the previous section. The Rules and Frame attributes were both introduced at the same time in HTML 4.0 and, together, were meant to give authors complex table border control. It was discovered in 12,628 URLs (0.44% of cases using TABLE). As with Frame, many values were detected in addition to the 5 accepted values. The most popular attribute value again turns the border off completely, and the next most popular turns it on completely. Give authors the keys to the sports car, and they only use it to drive to the corner grocery store.

TD and TH elements

These two elements are grouped together because they mostly share the same attributes and have very similar usage. However, their usage rates could not be more different. The TD element is the most popular of all the table sub-elements, and it is the ninth most popular element overall (used in 82.41% of all URLs in MAMA and 99.92% of all URLs using the TABLE element). The TH element, on the other hand, is used in only 5.13% of URLs using the TABLE element. Because of the inherent attribute overlap between TD and TH, it can be interesting to compare attribute usage rates between the two elements. Percentages of the total element usage are also provided to help with comparisons.

TR element

This element groups table cells (TD and TH elements) into rows. It was used in 2,891,205 URLs from MAMA, or 99.90% of all URLs that used the TABLE element. Unlike its TD and TH sub-elements, authors appear to eschew the use of attributes for TR - over 60% of all the URLs that used TR elements did not carry attributes for any TR instance.

TBODY, THEAD and TFOOT elements

These three elements are lumped together, but their usage varies widely. The most popular, TBODY, is only used in 12.60% of table situations. The TBODY element is almost 17 times as popular as THEAD, and TBODY leaves TFOOT in the dust by almost a factor of 100. A number of reasons could be found for the wide variation here, including editors being responsible for inflating the numbers of THEAD elements. However, we could take the semantic meaning at face value: maybe headers for tables are just not very popular. By the same token, one could say that even fewer authors are inclined to use footers for their tables. With the ever-popular usage of tables solely for layout, attaching such altruistic semantics to these elements may be folly anyway.

It would be unfair to say that authors never use attributes with these elements, but with the most popular attribute for each achieving a mere 0.25-0.4% of the overall element usage, the numbers only get worse.

CAPTION element

This element is poorly used in MAMA's URL set—only 0.81% of all TABLE occurrences.

COL and COLGROUP elements

As with the CAPTION element, both of these elements were found to have low usage rates (less than 1% of all table usages). Most instances of the COL element (83.76%) use the Width attribute, but other detected attributes for COL and COLGROUP are used in 15% of the element's instances or less.

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