Writing HTML by hand #
I write some of my pages using a markup language (emacs org-mode) and other pages using xhtml, with a few extra x:* tags that get expanded out into html later. I was curious, when I write html by hand, which tags do I use? I used Python's elementtree to get the answer:
3085 p 2466 a 2303 li 1042 em 1008 code 876 span 719 x:section 517 br 454 div 446 strong 424 h3 410 figure 359 ul 358 script 331 img 323 pre 262 td 249 x:document 228 x:footer 219 g
A lot of what I write is explanations in <p> paragraphs and <ul> <li> lists. And I try to include lots of <a> links to other supporting documents. I do try to use the semantic <em> and <strong> instead of the visual <i> and <b>. These results didn't surprise me much.
Here's the code (roughly):
tag_counts = collections.Counter() for doc in documents: tree = etree.fromstring(doc.contents) for el in tree.iter(): tag_counts[el.tag] += 1 for (tag, count) in tag_counts.most_common(20): print(f"{count:5} {tag}")
Do you write HTML by hand? If so, what tags do you use most?
Update: [2023-09-20] Some people commented on HackerNews about how they write their HTML, including some debate over closing tags, HTML vs XHTML, and markup languages.