Comments on: Ask MAMA what the web is made of

By: Mykalining

Mykalining — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:05:58 +0000

Удивительно, как свойственно человеку оберегать свой образ от поклонения, которое сделало бы его смешным или черезчур далёким от оригинала, а потому неправдоподобным.

By: iheni

iheni — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:25:03 +0000

Phew, thanks all, that’s quite the list. I’ve now tidied it up and sent it to Brian so stay tuned for updates. If you have other stuff to add though please don’t hold back…this is an ongoing project.

I’va also added in a request to search for media queries, handheld stylesheets, ActiveX and browser sniffing as well as expanded on a couple of the things above.
Good effort all round, thank you!

By: Isofarro

Isofarro — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:49:23 +0000

Look for pages that contain links to destination anchors ( [a name="..."][/a] ) or @id elements on the page they are currently on (e.g. skip links).

So look for occurances of links that in a normalised form look like this: [a href="#NAME"]…[/a] — Normalised meaning looking for these anchors that point to somewhere in the current page, not another page.

Collate the following:
1.) The link text used (e.g. Skip to content, Search this site)
2.) the name of the fragment (href=”#name”)
3.) Whether the destination is an element with id, or an anchor with a name attribute, or whether the destination point doesn’t exist on the page
4.) Where the id method is used, categorise which HTML element is being used (e.g. DIV, H1, A, FORM etc.)
5.) Where the method is an anchor with a name attribute, catalogue the destination ‘link’ text (well, link text didn’t sound right for a destination anchor)

It would be interesting to compare this with the usage of the ARIA role element. Both are used for signposting/destinations.

By: bruce

bruce — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:32:25 +0000

Brian, not so interested in abbr contents, no – as it’s a human-only job to verify that the contents and the title attributes match up. And I’m lazy.

Andy Mabbett asked “Why not just search for alt=”[*].jpg”, alt=”[*].png” etc?”. Because alt=”my-yellow-house.jpg” isn’t perfect alt text, but it’s human-friendly compared with “DSC123443.jpg”. I’m interested in the prevalence of totally useless alt text, probably inserted by a CMS or user-generated content website.

By: Brian Wilson

Brian Wilson — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 07:27:17 +0000

ppk wrote:
> Thanks for the pointers; I missed these reports. Script position
> would be interesting, but if it’s difficult to implement, never mind.

I don’t think this would be a major imposition, other than I’ll have to roll it into some post-processing of the condensed tag list for each document.

> Would it be possible to measure *which* events are most often
> used inline?

I think this covers what you are asking for:
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-event-handler-attributes/
If there are other interesting things about events I can have MAMA mine, please let me know.