Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

[David Nadlinger]

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