I remember the times when I did table nested designs to achieve good-lookin' rounded corners boxes that can be nested. In was Netscape 4 era and this browser gave me headaches crashing or freezing if table nesting was to high.

"[thead, tbody, tfoot] It would be unfair to say that authors never use attributes with these elements, but with the most popular attribute for each achieving a mere 0.25-0.4% of the overall element usage, the numbers only get worse."

With the only attributes available for these elements apparently being presentational (align, valign and bgcolor), I think it's *great* that they are barely used. If any of these need to be set, they should be done using CSS, so there is no call for them appearing as HTML attributes.

It's a shame that there has been no analysis of how many of these elements had classes and ids on them.

It's also no surprise the tfoot is so rarely used - I use tables (for data!) on most of my websites, and I'm struggling to think of any time I have wanted a tfoot element, even going back to before I knew about them! Whereas most of them _do_ have a thead.

Originally posted by Stevie-D:

"[thead, tbody, tfoot]
It's a shame that there has been no analysis of how many of these elements had classes and ids on them.

This data was actually stored by MAMA, and is available in some other corners of the study if you know where to dig.

TBODY:
Element frequency: 364,542
Using Class Attr: 1,375[0.38%]
Using Id Attr: 5,299[1.45%]

THEAD:
Element frequency: 21,474
Using Class Attr: 258[1.20%]
Using Id Attr: 95[0.44%]

TFOOT:
Element frequency: 3,947
Using Class Attr: 24[0.61%]
Using Id Attr: 13[0.33%]

Even though the Align/Valign/Bgcolor attribute effects should be done with CSS, for TBODY Class is only just as popular as any of those attributes. For THEAD, Class has a considerably higher usage rate than the HTML attributes. For TFOOT also, Class is more popular but at the quantities involved there's a definite chance for statistical fuzziness.