Re^2: Why PM does not need web stats

I believe your request for stats was because you were using fancy CSS for sizing/positioning and wanted to know if the number of IE users was small enough that you could decide to just break the site for them and not care.

That is incorrect. A response to PM redesign: status update suggested I "stop wasting time on IE" and "If the IE numbers are low (and I sure hope they are), a link to google chrome frame is all you need". In the post you are replying to I said the following "Considering the feedback I have received to drop IE support, how many people are using IE? Android? and which versions?" I asked because I want to know and understand the audience better not because I am planning on dropping support for something.

"This puzzled me because it was in the context of you writing a "mobile" version of the site. I didn't think "old IE that sucks at CSS" was an option on a "mobile" device.

I am making a Responsive design for PM which uses media queries to resize elements to better fit the screen size of the browsing device. It is not about old IE sucks at CSS it is about how old IE breaks HTML5 which leads to CSS not getting rendered. I talked about these issues in PM redesign: status update and gave a follow up response to your (tye) question on using CSS hacks to fix IE that goes into more depth about the problem.

My feedback is to stop doing things that require a bunch of fancy work-arounds in order for them to work in IE.

I am using standard, validator compliant markup to build this design. IE is broken period. IE does not follow the standards and that is just the reality of it. IE 9.x still does all kinds of stupid things. Here is a very recent breakdown of how much market share IE has and how bad its standards support in Old browsers are holding back the web. Coding to the standards and adding hacks to get IE working is the best practice for dealing with this kind of problem. Numerous projects like html5shiv, Modernizr, accessifyhtml5, Respond, normalize.css and many others ease the pain of IE and to a much lesser extent other browsers as well. Then we have projects like HTML5 Please, CSS3, please!, caniuse, and litmus which go further in helping chart and solve problems caused by different browsers not implementing the standards. There is simply too much broken in IE to create a modern site without some hacks. More progress is being made.

The marketing department has been pestering me about that for months.

From wikipedia with my emphasis added: Marketing is "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." Marketing does not mean putting ads on PM. Marketing PM which helps society is not evil or bad.

I'd be more interested in heatmap testing after some actual competent design was applied to site navigation and implemented. Getting stats for optimizing a dysfunctional navigation system would help you tweak it to be slightly more effective of a dysfunctional navigation system.

Yes heatmaps tell us information about the navigation system but they do so much more. All clicks, mouse movements, scrolling, and time information are tracked. What if thousands of users keep clicking on a section of a page they think is a link and it turns out not to be? That is a usability problem. That area can be turned into a link to the expected content, it could be styled different to not look like a link or the general link style can be changed to be less ambiguous. This happens all the time in website design and speculation is not a good replacement for actual hard data from end users.

I agree the current navigation scheme on PM could be a great deal better.

Comment on Re^2: Why PM does not need web stats

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^3: Why PM does not need web stats (working) by tye (Sage) on Jul 14, 2012 at 18:48 UTC
IE is broken period. IE works just fine here already. Period. What if thousands of users keep clicking on a section of a page they think is a link and it turns out not to be? You must be thinking about those sites that take away the one consistent part of Web user interfaces (to replace it with something of their own imagining): Links are underlined. That's not a mistake we made here. Well, except for the two top-line buttons that some people went to quite a lot of effort to eliminate every single visual clue that they actually are buttons. I think that was a mistake. But the lack of visual clues does make it look very nice and uniform (and misleadingly non-functional). Coding to the standards and adding hacks to get IE working is the best practice for dealing with this kind of problem. Yes, I'm aware of lots of things that are widely practiced in "modern" web design. Unfortunately, a lot of the reason I am aware of a lot of them is that I have to deal with how f'ed up they tend to make things. Well, not at PerlMonks, thankfully. I've repeatedly solicited actual good examples of CSS for sizing/positioning. The closest I've ever come was one example that really sucked on one of my browsers to which the submitter asserted that it was due to bugs in my browser. Yeah, cutting edge stuff is often buggy. That doesn't mean that "doesn't work" no longer matters. So maybe you'll be the first to show me a CSS solution that actually works. But, no, I'm not convinced that "widely accepted best practice" actually means "good idea" when I constantly see it failing without even trying to look. And when I try to look, it was always easy to find failure. I consider myself outside the asylum of modern web design. If you actually come up with something that actually works very well, then I'll be overjoyed but very surprised. But all I care about is how well it works and at what cost. Coding to the standards [....]More progress is being made. There are plenty of standards to choose from. When you are done with "progress" enough that your newer standards actually "work", then I think it would be a fine time to adopt them. When it comes to choosing standards, I much prefer "it works" over "it is new". Especially when "doesn't work on" includes some of the most prevalent browsers. New standards are nice and can be important in setting direction, etc. And that includes early adopters finding and working out kinks. PerlMonks is not in the business of early adopting new web standards and working out kinks and worrying about market share of versions of browsers. I'm sure that annoys several people. But it is also appreciated by quite a few people. And it is actually working pretty well, IMO. - tye	[reply]
Re^4: Why PM does not need web stats (working) by jdtoronto (Prior) on Aug 03, 2012 at 15:48 UTC
Functionality is King, the look and feel hasn't much changed since day one and really doesn't need to. As far as IE is concernedm well, I am using IE now, and at work we are locked down to IE. So just because some zealots don't like it, please don't crucify those who have no choice. For preference I use Chromw on Windows or Android. JD	[reply]
Re^3: Why PM does not need web stats by cavac (Vicar) on Jul 15, 2012 at 19:04 UTC
IE is broken period All browsers are broken in one way or the other, if you want 100% standard compliance. As for IE, Except for some small Javascript+DOM issues, IE8 and higher works. And you do not need to support older versions. The oldest Windows versions still supported by Microsoft are XP and Windows Server 2003, both of which can (and should, from a security standpoint) run IE8. Where you run into trouble with various browsers is fancy CSS positioning and transitioning stuff, table'd layouts on the other hand work just fine and adapt very good to the browser window size. So, yes, IE has a lot of bugs. But guess what, Firefox has it's own share of rendering bugs and sometimes needs a few plugins to keep it happy. Chrome&Chromium have their own share of problems. Most touch-screen optimized browsers have broken Drag&Drop API's or require special Javascript treatment. And there are the text-only browsers, often used in conjunction with screenreaders or Braille terminals, that may or may not support CSS at all. So, name me one browser that isn't broken. Sorry for any bad spelling, broken formatting and missing code examples. During a slight disagreement with my bicycle (which i lost), i broke my left forearm near the elbow. I'm doing the best i can here...	[reply]