On Monday, 12 March 2012 at 23:04:17 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
Does nobody understand basic statistics?
First of all, 1-2% is a *hell* of a *LOT* of people. Don't be
fooled by the
seemingly small number: It's a percentage and it's out of a
*very* large
population. So 1-2% is still *huge*.
And 1-2% is still 1/100 to 1/50 of all users, no matter how large
the total number is. Arguing in absolute numbers makes no sense
if you don't even know in advance how large your target audience
is. What point are you trying to make here?
B. Look at audience: That's *Yahoo*. How many of the technical
people you
know use Yahoo? Yahoo is primarily an "Average Joe" site, but
disabling
JavaScript is a power-user thing. It's not a representative
sample, and it
*certainly* can't be assumed to be applicable to something like
Dr. Dobbs.
C. Things such as Google Analytics are based on JS. So right
there I have
questions about whether or not such things accurately record
all non-JS
users in the first place.
Stats are pretty much the same (98.5% among ~10000 »unique«
visitors over the last months) for my programming-centric blog,
where I added a non-JS tracking pixel precisely because I was
interested in whether the figures would different for tech-y
sites.
Besides, I am totally in favor of not needlessly required JS, but
it does have its legitimate uses.
David
