Barney Carroll wrote: > david wrote: >> Another thing to consider: a percentage by itself is meaningless. It >> must always be a percentage of something. Now if you swallow the bilge >> that many so-called monitoring sites report as percentages, you need to >> turn that into real numbers. If Konqueror has a "share" of 1%, and your >> target is the US, then you're talking about roughly 3 million potential >> visitors. That seems like a lot of potential customers to me! > > Everybody is a 'potential customer' in the most forgiving of theories, > David, but I'd be incredibly surprised if everyone in the US visited > your website.
They don't have to. I was just using it as an example of a base, the real number corresponding to "100%". Then you can turn values less than 100% into real numbers. At which point, you have some idea of how many potential customers you might be figuratively "locking out of your shop". If you're able to turn even 1% of those 3 million customers into paying customers, while your competition is locking them out - your site has 30000 more paying customers, which is pretty good for a lot of businesses ... > The 'bilge' reported as percentages is still percentages... It is still > as a fraction compared to the whole that you determine whether a > demographic is a minority or not. 3 million potential customers are > still a minority if you're talking about the population of the US. In > the grand scheme of things, it's _still_ insignificant. No, it's not. Because your typical business isn't concerned about the "grand scheme of things". They're concerned about their little piece of it. There it IS significant. > > So you don't want to "pollute" your HTML with IE's well-supported > > conditional comments, but you're willing to pollute your CSS with some > > newly-found hack instead? Seems unwise to me - CC are well documented > > and well supported by IE, while the IE-specific CSS interpretation > > that a hack depends on might go away in any future IE bug fix ... > > IE bug fixes of this nature have no historical precedent. That's not > saying your statement is incorrect - the possibility is conceivable - > but I'm still confident. I never tire of this childish optimism when I > suggest that, if Microsoft were to periodically update their browser, > they might focus on actually improving it before they get to the > all-important task of stripping it of support for the hacks that were > allowing things to display right in the first place. Contrary to popular > belief, it is not Microsoft's primary goal to have everything render > like sh!t on their software! I disagree with that. They have every incentive to make things render weird in their browser - so people will look at their market share, say to themselves, "Well, they're the big one, don't worry about the minority browsers" and go around designing sites that only look good in IE. Then ordinary people using the minority browsers will eventually get tired of sites not working right in their browser - and decide they might was well use IE. The MS philosophy of "Embrace and extend" is still active, and always has the goal of extending in ways that their competition do not or cannot match. -- David [EMAIL PROTECTED] authenticity, honesty, community ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d IE7 information -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=IE7 List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
