Do Web Authors Use HTML Tags to Flag Semantic Content?

An investigation into the use of HTML tags as flags for semantic content as found in web pages related to logic programming. Statistics on the tags used and examples of informative and uninformative tagged text are given. 1 Expectations of Tag Sematics This paper is the result of the initial stages of a larger project devoted to the automated analysis of web documents. As a preliminary part of this project I examined a number of web pages to understand the way in which web page authors use HTML markup in their web pages. To be more precise I am interested in determining whether, consciously or otherwise authors, use headers or the highlighted text accompanying a link, to indicate the subject matter of their web pages. To the extent that authors make use of HTML Permanent Address: St. Joseph's University Philadelphia PA.jhodgson@sju.edu in this way it should be possible to make use of the phenomenon to improve the quality of search engines. As has been the case for others my own e..