Most users (79.1%) reported spending 1 to 6 hours to learn HTML and almost half (49.7%) spent
under 3 hours. These percentages are nearly identical to those from the fourth survey.
Again, European users report spending less time learning HTML than US users.
For this question, authors were asked to rate their knowledge of Java's security measures as:
"None at all", "A little (e.g. could list some of them)", "Moderate (e.g. have read the white paper)",
"A lot (e.g. have a thorough understanding of flaws recently found)", or "Expert (e.g. have written code to test
them) ".
Of those who knew something about Java's security, more than half of the respondents reported that they
know "a little" (53.9%). 45.0% reported knowing a "moderate" amount or "a lot". Only 1.0% considered themselves
experts.
This question asked Web authors what they thought the major advantages of Java were. Respondents could
choose more than one answer.
The most cited advantage was Java's platform independence which was noted by 46.7% of respondents.
The next largest category was "Other/Do not Know" with 42.64%. About a quarter of respondents identified
the fact that Java doesn't require special permissions (unlike CGI programming) (24.9%) and better
interactivity (23.5%) as major advantages.
Only 11.5% of users cited built-in security measures as an advantage of Java programming.
More than half of the authors responding see Java's value as mainly functional (54.9%).
Almost 30% feel it is mainly aesthetic or adds no value at all. The remaining 15% think it represents
a revolution that will fundamentally change the Web.
This question has changed slightly since the fourth survey, so a direct comparison is not
possible.
Almost half of the authors who responded have not done any CGI programming. For those who
have, the language of choice is PERL (21.7%). The next most common are apple script (7.8%) and
"other" (4.4%).
Users in Europe were more likely to have done CGI programming, which follows from the fact
that they also tend to have more programming experience. (See: Years
Programming.)
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 (5.1) followed by image maps (3.5), Forms (3.3) and HTML
overall (2.4). These ratings are nearly identical to the third and fourth surveys.
For this question, users were allowed to mark more than one answer.
Almost all respondents (97.1%) include links to other WWW pages in their documents.
The next most common are images (85.2%) followed by links to CGI scripts (52.6%), imagemaps (46.5%) and
FTP (44.2%). The least common are VRML (4.3%), movies (15.4%), gopher (15.7%) and plug-ins (15.0%).
22.1% reported using Java applets in their pages.
Number of Documents Authored Using Publishing Software
This question is new for the fifth survey, and tries to determine the percentage of authors who
are using specific Web Publishing software to create their pages, as opposed to those who write
directly in HTML.
About a third of Web authors (32.6%) reported never using Web Publishing software. Another third
(33.7%) have used it to author less than 10 documents.
The number of authors who have less than 7 years programming experience has risen again
in the fifth survey to 64.0% from 58.5% in the fourth. The number of respondents with no programming
experience has risen steadily since the third survey from 16.8% to 20.2% in the fourth to 24.6% in
the fifth.
European authors have considerably more programming experience with 53.2% having more than
7 years experience compared to 37.0% of US authors.
For this question, users were allowed to mark more than one answer.
Online documentation was the most popular source and was consulted by 81.6% of respondents.
The number of users consulting books about HTML rose again slightly from 44.5% to 50.9%.
More European respondents reported using online sources (90.9%) and fewer reported using
books (36.2%).
For this question, users were allowed to mark more than one answer.
As with the fourth survey, the most popular topics of pages authored are personal home
pages (78.6%) and work-related pages (75.2%). Similarly the least popular topics remain conferences
(13.1%) and sports (10.2%).
The percentages for all categories are up slightly from the fourth survey, except for meta-indices
("pointers") and research topics.
An equal or higher percentage of European respondents report author pages across all categories.
