Information Providers/HTML Authors Bulleted List

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Non-Webmasters Who Can Publish Documents Easily

• Note: these graphs don't accurately represent the relative proportions. They will be fixed ASAP. Numbers in the bullets are correct.

• For this question, users who do not operate a server (i.e. are not Webmasters) were asked if they could easily add documents to their organization's Web.

• The majority of non-Webmasters that have access to the Web can also add documents to it (82.33%).

• A smaller percentage of Prodigy users (71.60%) can easily add documents.

• Slightly fewer women than men (81.03% vs. 85.83%) replied that they can easily add documents to the web.

Policy and Charging for Advertising on Website

• The vast majority of users replied that this question was "Not Applicable" (70.61%) or that they "Don't Allow Ads" (24.02%) for a total of 94.63%.

• For those that do allow ads, the largest percentage (3.25%) charge under $50 per week. Only 0.36% charge over $510 per week.

• A smaller percentage of Prodigy users (89.81%) replied "Not Applicable" or "Don't Allow Ads" when compared to overall users. The difference is made up by those charging under $50 per week (7.41% for Prodigy vs. 3.25% overall).

Hours Spent Learning Basis of HTML

• Most users (82.0%) spent between 1 and 6 hours learning HTML. Many users learned HTML in only 1 to 3 hours (55.2%).

• The category "Not Applicable" refers to users who have created web documents, but who have not actually written HTML. Only 2.3% of users creating web documents have not learned basic HTML.

• Users in Europe report spending less time learning HTML than users in the US (86.55% vs. 81.65% spending less than 6 hours).

• Prodigy users report spending slightly more time learning HTML with 4.47% more spending more than 12 hours.

• 7.05% more Prodigy users responded with "Not Applicable" than overall users.

• Females also report spending more time learning basic HTML than males (78.65% vs. 82.57% spending less than 6 hours).

Overall Learning of HTML and Specific HTML Features

• For this question, users were asked to rate the difficulty of learning HTML overall and some specific features of HTML (CGI, FORMS, and ISMAP) on a scale of 1 to 9.

• CGI was rated the most difficult (4.996) followed by FORMS (3.976), ISMAP (3.894), and HTML overall (2.471). Interestingly, none of these averages are near the maximum difficulty rating of 9.0.

• Users in Europe ranked each category slightly less difficult than users in the US did.

• Prodigy users rated HTML, FORMS, and ISMAP more difficult to learn than overall users.

• Females rated ISMAP (4.374 vs. 3.845) and CGI (5.573 vs. 4.921) more difficult to learn than males did, but showed no differences in rating FORMS or HTML overall.

Types of HyperLinks Documents Contain

• For this question, users were allowed to mark more than one answer.

• The most common type of link is to other WWW documents with 95.41% of users including them in their documents. The next most common are images and "other" links with 85.96% and 73.83% of users including them, respectively.

• The least popular are ISINDEX (12.07%) and WWW servers (14.49%).

• Across all categories, except WWW Servers, fewer Prodigy users report using each type of link. Most notable is that 19.07% fewer Prodigy users use FORMS and 24.49% fewer use interactive links.

• On the other hand, while only 14.49% of overall users report using links to WWW Servers, they are used by 24.3% of Prodigy users.

• There are some small differences between genders with 9.84% fewer females using interactive links and 6.43% more females using gopher links.

How Many People Documents Maintained For

• Over half (53.98%) of users replied "Not Applicable" to this question indicating that they do not maintain documents fopr other people. Of those who do, the largest group maintain documents for 1 to 10 people (19.73%).

• Webmasters in Europe maintain documents for slightly more peole on average than users in the US.

• 75.7% of Prodigy Webmasters do not maintain documents for other people.

• A higher percentage of females than males replied that they do not maintain documents for other people(65.89% vs. 52.75%).

Mirroring of Other WWW Sites

• Most servers do not mirror other sites (91.45%).

• The only group which does noticeably more mirroring is Prodigy users, with 15.38% mirroring sites compared to 8.55% for overall users.

Number of Documents Authored

• "Authored" in this question means created using HTML directly. Another question covers the number of documents converted to HTML from some other format. (See Converted.)

• The most common number of documents authored is 1 to 10 (36.27%) closely followed by 11 to 50 (33.38%). Only 12.34% of users report authoring over 100 documents.

• On average, users in Europe have authored more documents than users in the US. The curve for Europe peaks at 11 to 50 documents (38.15%) while the curve for the US peaks at 1 to 10 documents (37.32%).

• The largest group of Prodigy users have authored 1 to 10 pages (45.79%) and the second largest group have not authored any (24.3%).

• On average, females have authored slightly fewer documents than males.

• This question refers only to documents which were not created in HTML, but were converted to HTML by some automated process. (e.g. Webmaker, RTF2html)

• Overall, 51.09% of users have never converted a document to HTML and another 30.16% have converted less than 10. Only 4.62% have converted over 100 documents.

• More users in Europe have converted at least 1 document (53.21%) than users in the US (48.91%).

Authors Who Operate WWW Servers

• This question was asked only to those who said they have authored web documents.

• The responses are nearly equally divided with 46.02% of users operating a server, and 53.98% not operating one.

• Quite a few more users in Europe operate a server than users in the US (56.43% vs. 43.83%).

• Most Prodigy users do not operate a server (75.7%).

• 13.14% more males operate a server than do females.

Port Server Listens To

• The vast majority of servers listen to port 80 (87.18%); only a few listen to 8000 (5.12%), some other port (4.53%), or 70/80 (1.55%).

• However, only 61.54% of servers run by Prodigy users listen to port 80. Many more listen to some other port (15.38%) when compared to overall users.

Number of Years Programming

• Overall, 51.48% of users have been programming for less than 7 years and 48.52% for more than 7 years. Only 16.78% had no programming experience, while nearly a quarter (24.98%) have over 12 years experience.

• European users, in general, have more programming experience with 60.64% having more than 7 years.

• The largest group of Prodigy users has 1 to 3 years experience (28.97%), but the second largest group have over 12 years experience (24.3%).

• As the number of programming years increases across the categories, the number of females steadily decreases. In contrast, the number of males generally increases.

Operation of Proxies

• Only a small percentage of users (12.63%) operate a proxy server.

• A much higher percentage of European users operate a server than do American users (21.00% vs. 8.66%).

• There are no differences found between Prodigy/non-Prodigy or gender for this question.

Sources Consulted in Learning HTML

• For this question, users were allowed to mark more than one answer.

• On-line documentation was consulted by 88.41% of users in learning HTML. The next two most popular sources, books and friends, were consulted by only 29.24% and 25.19% of users, respectively.

• Even more users in Europe use on-line documentation (91.77%) and even fewer use books (17.47%) or friends (21.49%).

• While many Prodigy users use on-line documentation (66.36%), more consult books (45.79% vs. 29.24%) and other sources (34.58% vs. 18.63%) when compared to overall users.

• Nearly as many females as males use on-line documentation (85.42% vs. 88.65%), but more females also consult gurus (10.12% more) and friends (7.09% more).

Speed of Server Connection to Internet

• The most common server connection speed is 10 Mb/sec (32.254%). The next most common are 1 Mb/sec with 18.070% and 56 Kb/sec with 14.119%.

• A large percentage of Prodigy users were unsure about their connection speed: 23.077% compared to 8.4197% for overall users.

• Of those who knew their speeds, Prodigy users had more high speed (100 Mb/sec and over) and more low speed (28 Kb/sec and under) connections than overall users.

• More females than males (25.191% vs. 6.844%) were unsure of their connection speed.

Topics of Documents Authored

• For this question, users were allowed to mark more than one answer.

• By far, the most popular topics for pages are work-related (76.9%) and personal pages (75.14%). The least popular topics are conferences (11.39%) and sports (5.63%).

• Fewer Prodigy users have authored work-related (53.27%) and personal pages (57.01), but they have authored more entertainment (38.32% vs. 34.16%) pages and pages on "other" topics (42.06% vs. 33.08%).

• Fewer females have authored personal pages (64.58% vs. 76.54%) and entertainment pages (25.78% vs. 34.93%) than males, but they are nearly equal in other categories.

Which Server Currently Used

• Overall, the most popular server is NCSA's (38.60%) followed by MacHTTP (20.79%) and CERN's (18.46%).

• In Europe, however, the most popular server is CERN's (34.88%).

• The types of servers operated by Prodigy users differ greatly from the overall users. The most popular is a mystery ("other") at 40.91% followed by winHTTP at 31.82%. CERN's and NetSite tie for third at 13.64%.

• More females operate NCSA's server than males (44.27% vs. 38.71%).

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send e-mail to www-survey@cc.gatech.edu.

GVU's WWW Surveying Team
Graphics, Visualization, & Usability Center
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280