RE: [xml-dev] [Watchers of the Web] The evolving form of information on the Web?

["Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>]

Bryan asks an excellent question: 

What data should be collected to provide meaningful results?

Bryan notes two kinds of data that could be collected:

(1) File Count Data: count the number of files, i.e., count the number
HTML files, count the number of MP3 files, count the number of MPEG
files, and so forth.

A problem to be resolved is: suppose that an HTML file contains, say,
three GIF images.  Do you count that as: 

1 for HTML
2 for GIF

Will file count yield the best data?

(2) Byte Count Data: count the number of bytes of the information on
the Web that is in HTML form, count the number of bytes of the
information on the Web that is in MPEG form, and so forth.

Would byte count yield more meaningful data than file count?

Is there other data besides file count data and byte count data?

If you were to design an experiment to determine the percentage of
information per content type, what data would you measure?  (I am not
asking "how" to measure the data; I am asking "what" data you would
measure)

Any ideas?  /Roger
 

-----Original Message-----
From: bryan rasmussen [mailto:rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, May 07, 2006 10:32 AM
To: Costello, Roger L.
Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] [Watchers of the Web] The evolving form of
information on the Web?

How exactly are you defining percentage, for example percentage of
actual data size would probably be quite a bit differently than
percentage of number of files.

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen

On 5/7/06, Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org> wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> There are over 350 different content (MIME) types.  Some common
content
> types include HTML, XML, GIF, JPG, JPEG, MP3, MPEG, RSS, SVG.
>
> Information exchanged on the Web is in the form of one of these
content
> types.  (Sometimes an information exchange contains a collection of
> items, each item with different content type.)
>
> I would like to know:
>
> Of all the information being exchanged on the Web:
>
> what percentage of the information is in the form of the HTML content
> type, what percentage of the information is in the form of the XML
> content type, what percentage of the information is in the form of
the
> GIF content type, what percentage of the information is in the form
of
> the MP3 content type, what percentage of the information is in the
form
> of the MPEG content type, what percentage of the information is in
the
> form of the JPG content type, and so forth, for all the content
types.
>
> I speculate that the percentages are something like this:
>
> Content type   Percentage
> ---------------------------
> HTML           90%
> JPG             2%
> JPEG            2%
> GIF             2%
> MP3             2%
> XML             1%
> ...
>
> However, that's purely my guess.  (What is your guess?)
>
> In addition, I am interested in seeing how the percentage is changing
> over time - I am interested in seeing the evolving form of
information
> on the Web.
>
> Has anyone done such an investigation?
>
> /Roger
>
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