The “Phylogeny” of Scientific Life.
Image: created by Websites as Graphics.

KEY: What do these colored dots mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

After PZ posted the graphical representation of web tags for his blog, I couldn’t resist doing the same for my site, especially since this graphic superficially resembles an unrooted phylogenetic tree, which is one way to analyze the molecular sequence data I generated from my research birds.

So, what does this graphic mean? Basically, it is a graphical description of the structure of a particular website or blog, with specific html tags color-coded. The creators of this code write;

Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web. Your browser’s job is to render the HTML according to the specs (most of the time, at least). You can look at the code behind any website by selecting the “View source” tab somewhere in your browser’s menu.

HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph. I’ve written a little app that visualizes such a graph, and here are some screenshots of websites that I often look at.

You can watch the computer build this tree in real time, too. Try it for your own site!