Onderstekop

Today I had another go with Google Trends; a web application John 'Beautiful Mind' Forbes Nash would possibly drool over. I started comparing some of the programming languages, standards and aspects that are used in modern day web development and I was quite suprised by what it came up with. Click the headers to show the graphs.

PHP vs. Java. vs. Perl vs. Ruby

Java still is the hottest programming language searched for (even compared to C++, python, etc.), and that was quite to my surprise. Off course, Java is not only used in the web development world and I feel this has biased the results too much. I can't remember the last time I saw an applet and I'm not seeing any Java questions coming in at the web development fora I visit, so I'm just going to ignore this statistic for now (I feel like a politician). What's interesting about this graph? PHP still reigns in internet scripting world, Perl is dying and Ruby hardly shows any trend.

HTML vs. XHTML

A strange graph. We see a decline in searches on html; yet there are only a couple of searches on xhtml (this is guess-work due to the unscaled y-axis). This chart is unfair though, because they will probably count searches like 'html a', 'html li' and 'html p' as well and those tags are the same in XHTML. It does show however, that there isn't much XHTML awareness. I'm not sure if that's a bad thing.

Firefox vs. Internet Explorer

Although you probably won't google much for IE, since it's already installed by default when you're using Windows, this chart is somewhat similar to the one I get from looking at my site's statistics: Firefox has taken over the number one position. Maybe -in the near future- web developers won't have to spend all the extra hours to get everything to work and look the same on cross-browser (meaning every browser and IE), since nobody is using it anyway (amongst dozens of other reasons which already has lead to many sites, which don't look and/or feel the same in IE)

DHTML vs. CSS vs. JavaScript

This chart was also kind of surprising since it shows a decline in DHTML usage (which basically is a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, in case you didn't know). JavaScript is searched for less and less, CSS search count has been stable for the last couple of years and the once trendy word DHTML isn't getting any searches at all anymore. Oh, how times change.

XSS vs. SQL Injection

This last comparison just goes to show that web developers nowadays seem a little bit better informed about the possible threads hiding in their code. SQL injection has always been a hot topic according to this graph, but somewhere along the year 2004 when 'web 2.0' was starting off, the topic XSS suddenly became relevant and is currently up there with SQL injection fighting over the first place.

Conclusion

Google Trends is far from perfect since it generally produces unreliable, biased trends on a graph that hasn't even got an y-scale, but still, it has shown us some interesting things. As said, the results should be taken with a grain of salt, but they help in describing what 2007 looked like web-wise: PHP and HTML on the backend, CSS, JavaScript and Firefox on the frontend.