Use of deprecated HTML features on the web?

Analysis
11

For the Markup chapter of the Web Almanac I revisited this topic. Here are the latest results:

#standardSQL
# 03_01a: % of pages with deprecated elements
CREATE TEMPORARY FUNCTION containsDeprecatedElement(payload STRING)
RETURNS BOOLEAN LANGUAGE js AS '''
try {
  var $ = JSON.parse(payload);
  var elements = JSON.parse($._element_count)
  var deprecatedElements = new Set(["applet","acronym","bgsound","dir","frame","frameset","noframes","isindex","keygen","listing","menuitem","nextid","noembed","plaintext","rb","rtc","strike","xmp","basefont","big","blink","center","font","marquee","multicol","nobr","spacer","tt"]);
  return !!Object.keys(elements).find(e => {
    return deprecatedElements.has(e);
  });
} catch (e) {
  return false;
}
''';

SELECT
  _TABLE_SUFFIX AS client,
  COUNTIF(containsDeprecatedElement(payload)) AS pages,
  ROUND(COUNTIF(containsDeprecatedElement(payload)) * 100 / COUNT(0), 2) AS pct_pages
FROM
  `httparchive.pages.2019_07_01_*`
GROUP BY
  client
client pages % of pages with deprecated elements
mobile 804387 15.18%
desktop 705134 16.13%

Top deprecated elements:

#standardSQL
# 03_01b: Top deprecated elements
CREATE TEMPORARY FUNCTION getElements(payload STRING)
RETURNS ARRAY<STRING> LANGUAGE js AS '''
try {
  var $ = JSON.parse(payload);
  var elements = JSON.parse($._element_count)
  return Object.keys(elements);
} catch (e) {
  return [];
}
''';

CREATE TEMPORARY FUNCTION isDeprecated(element STRING) AS (
  element IN ("applet","acronym","bgsound","dir","frame","frameset","noframes","isindex","keygen","listing","menuitem","nextid","noembed","plaintext","rb","rtc","strike","xmp","basefont","big","blink","center","font","marquee","multicol","nobr","spacer","tt")
);

SELECT
  _TABLE_SUFFIX AS client,
  element AS deprecated,
  COUNT(0) AS freq,
  SUM(COUNT(0)) OVER (PARTITION BY _TABLE_SUFFIX) AS total,
  ROUND(COUNT(0) * 100 / SUM(COUNT(0)) OVER (PARTITION BY _TABLE_SUFFIX), 2) AS pct
FROM
  `httparchive.pages.2019_07_01_*`,
  UNNEST(getElements(payload)) AS element
WHERE
  isDeprecated(element)
GROUP BY
  client,
  deprecated
ORDER BY
  freq DESC,
  client
client deprecated freq total pct
mobile center 421571 1010479 41.72
mobile font 390929 1010479 38.69
desktop center 363308 887408 40.94
desktop font 350413 887408 39.49
mobile marquee 63378 1010479 6.27
desktop marquee 46620 887408 5.25
desktop nobr 31002 887408 3.49
mobile nobr 29247 1010479 2.89
mobile big 24996 1010479 2.47
desktop big 23030 887408 2.6
mobile frame 18649 1010479 1.85
mobile frameset 18387 1010479 1.82
desktop frame 17147 887408 1.93
desktop frameset 16902 887408 1.9
mobile noframes 14531 1010479 1.44
mobile strike 14346 1010479 1.42
desktop strike 14270 887408 1.61
desktop noframes 11060 887408 1.25

Kind of surprised to see such a big change since my last analysis. Namely, center taking over the top spot from font and marquee jumping up the list. This could be due to the corpus changes that happened between these times, with our dataset reaching more of the tail of the web. The methodologies are also a bit different, before I was querying over the HTML itself with a regular expression, and now I’m using a custom metric that extracts each tag at runtime.

You can explore the full results in this sheet.