JavaScript Disabled by 1.5% – Yahoo!
Thursday, February 24th, 2011
OK so Yahoo! are one organisation that probably have a broad enough reach to be able to tell us how many web travellers engage our work artifacts with JavaScript disabled. It’s around 1.5 per cent… in the United States it’s around 2 per cent.
The Danger of Percentages as a Fudging Mechanism
In the Yahoo! article Nicholas Zakas calls it how it is – 1.5 per cent of web traffic is a whopping number in real figures and any web designer ignoring 1.5 per cent needs to be cautioned. There will always be significant groups with JavaScript disabled and the answer, of course, is in progressive enhancement – building a website that works for the lowest common denominator then enhancing that website with JavaScript and fuller features.
Some, including Richard Shepherd on Smashing Magazine, will call this 1.5 per cent out as the insignificant other part of web traffic that your business can forget. In that perspective, if you were offered 98.5 per cent of an apple pie (small or large) it may feel like you got to eat it all. Unfortunately 98.5 per cent of web traffic is a far cry from 100 per cent.
The problem emanates from the inability of percentages to impart comparative meaning. It becomes about apples and oranges. And when percentages become less than around 12 per cent we have a human tendency to fudge this under the umbrella of it being hardly anybody at all. A trivial amount.
So the first thing is to understand that 98.5 per cent of a pie does not equal 98.5 per cent of web users does not equal 98.5 per cent of a unit mark in a university exam for computer science.
Percentages without Context are Vacuous
Percentages used in this context become vacuous fudging mechanisms for conversations that need hard numbers. This is exactly what Nicholas Zakas pushes in his Yahoo! article:
