By now, at least a third of you probably know about the Pew Research paper disclosing how most folks use the Internet.
For simplicity, here's a summary:
| 1/3 | Savvy | 1/2 addicted to technology |
| 1/2 Not all that addicted to it | ||
| 1/3 | Not So Savvy | 1/2 use it to find people to talk to |
| 1/2 Use it to play solitare | ||
| 1/3 | the digital Amish | Do not use the interwebs & think Ted Stevens is a genius |
Now, think about that for a second. This goes way beyond the George Carlin's average idiot.
What this report highlights is that well over 2/3rd's of the folks out there not only "don't get it" but really, "don't want to get it" either. Only 1/2 of 1/3rd of the potential audience have the desire to see all the gee-wizardry of those swell floating blocks and dynamically generated pages. The rest are on dial-up (if even that), and have better things to do with their lives. Ever bring up a new map site on a 56K modem? (Seriously, any of them.) Berners-Lee forbid you do something crazy like load up Google Earth and show it to your in-laws.
At work, we talk about what to do to support "Graceful degradation" meaning that if you're on an older browser or a fringe system (macs running safari aren't supposed to be fringe, by the way), but now i'm thinking that it should be more than that. We should handle connection degradation too. If we see a page taking a long time to load, we provide a far lighter version (hell, we should provide a far lighter version anyway). i know that Maps and Mail both provide those, but there are lots of other sites that don't.
*sigh*
Granted, teaching that particular bit of faith is probably tantamount to me proclaiming that Latin really isn't that dead a language and we should support that as part of our internationalization set.
more - the 1/3 savvy and addicted to tech, also tend to not be awe inspired by flashy UIs for the sake of being flashy UIs. For example, the new Y! Sports page that is all dressed up, loads slower, runs slower in my browser, and generally provides no added functionality over the previous revision. I have a dual-core Athlon 64, and elite DSL (1.5Mbps down), and I MUCH perfered the old page because it was quick to load and to the point. "Flashy" is not implicitly "better".
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If you don't include Latin, you're excluding all those Latin Americans.