MAMA: The "average" Web page

By Brian Wilson

Introduction

This section will attempt to describe the construction of a typical Web page based on the statistics presented in the MAMA research. This is not meant to imply that ALL, or even most Web pages look like this; it is a composite view of features that a significant percentage of MAMA's URLs commonly exhibit—an "average" Web page in the literal sense. The barrier to entry on this list is each component having at least half of the overall MAMA URL set or a majority of the particular technology directly in use.

HTTP Headers

  • Protocol: HTTP/1.1
  • HTTP Header Fields Present:
    • Accept-Ranges
    • Connection (value is "close")
    • Content-Length
    • Content-Range
    • Content-Type (charset parameter not specified)
    • Date
    • ETag
    • Last-Modified
    • Server (value is an Apache variant)

The Page

  • Document size: Main document is just over 16,400 characters
  • Doctype: HTML 4.x transitional variant doctype is used, with a system identifier
  • Rendering Mode: Quirks mode
  • Document encoding: Specified using the META element, set to "iso-8859-1"
  • Tag ratio: Ratio of markup to non-markup content is 61.64%
  • Basic markup structure: HTML, HEAD and BODY elements used; Bgcolor attribute used on BODY
  • Comments: About 12 on average; just over 2,250 characters
  • Character entities: At least one, including non-breaking space entity ( )
  • Technologies not used: BOM, Event-handler attributes, Forms, Frames, Plugins and XML

Markup validation

  • Does not pass markup validation
  • No fatal validator errors
  • Validator warnings:
    • "W06"—Unable to determine parse mode (XML/SGML)
    • "W09"—No DOCTYPE found (Yes, this contradicts the doctype statement above.)
  • Validation errors - 5, including:
    • 108: There is no attribute X
    • 127: Required attribute X not specified

Markup

HEAD Section

  • Elements used: LINK, META, SCRIPT, TITLE
  • LINK element: 1-2 external stylesheets (Rel attribute value is "Stylesheet", Type attribute value is "text/css"); Total size: just under 8,500 characters; "style.css" is the most likely name of one of the external style sheets.
  • META elements: Contains 3 META statements:
    • 1 for search engine keywords (Name="keywords")
    • 1 for search engine description (Name="description")
    • 1 for setting the MIME type with charset parameter: "iso-8859-1" (Http-equiv="Content-Type")
  • SCRIPT element: Uses Language, Src and Type attributes. Contains at least 2 Scripts:
    • External script - Typically 1, average: 2.5. Total size: just over 26,500 characters
    • Embedded script - Typically 1, average: 3.6. Total size: just under 2,500 characters

BODY Section

  • Block level elements:
    • BR element
    • DIV and P elements with the Align attribute
    • DIV element also uses Id and Style attributes
  • Tables: TABLE, TR, and TD all used. Tables typically nested 3 levels deep. The following attributes are used:
    • TABLE: Border, Cellpadding, Cellspacing
    • TD: Align, Class, Colspan, Height, Valign, Width
  • Phrase elements: FONT and B element. FONT has the following attributes:
    • Color: Using white, black or red colors specified with hex notation
    • Face: Value includes the "arial" font
    • Size: Set to Size="2"
  • Images:
    • 23 inline images (via IMG element)
    • 12 unique image URL references
    • The images use the Alt, Border, Height, Width and Src attributes
    • Image formats used are a mix of GIF and JPEG, with GIFs favored slightly
  • Hyperlinks:
    • 38 hyperlinks
    • Uses the Class attribute
    • One or more links outside the document's domain
    • One or more has Target attribute value set to "_blank"
    • One or more has event handler script attributes (Onmouseover and/or Onmouseout)

CSS

  • Inline CSS (Style attribute): Total size ~1000 characters
  • External CSS (LINK element):
    • 1-2 external style sheets used
    • MIME type used is "text/css"
    • Total size: just under 8,500 characters
    • "style.css" is file name of one of the external style sheets
  • Uses the :hover pseudo-class
  • CSS properties used:
    • Background-color
    • Color
    • Font-family
    • Font-size
    • Font-weight
    • Height
    • Text-align
    • Text-decoration
    • Width

Script

  • External scripts: At least 1, avg: 2.5; Total size just over 26,500 characters
  • Embedded scripts: At least 1, avg: 3.6; Total size just under 2,500 characters
  • Event handlers: At least 1, avg: 19.2; Total size just under 1,000 characters
  • External script MIME type: "application/x-javascript"
  • JavaScript/ECMAScript keywords used:
    • Basic language: function, if, var, new, return, else, for, true, false, null
    • Global object methods: escape, eval, parseInt
    • Array object: length
    • String object: indexOf, length, substring
  • DOM keywords used:
    • Document object: document.getElementById, write
    • Element object: id, innerHTML
    • Event-related objects: onload, addEventListener
    • Location object: href
    • Navigator object: appName, appVersion, userAgent
    • Window object: window, navigator, location
  • Other script keywords used: Image, height, src, width
  • Script factors not used: Does not mention a browser; Does not use any recognized DHTML menus/libraries

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