Comments on: Lies, Damned Lies and Analytics

By: Adrian Sutton

Adrian Sutton — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:49:10 +0000

Mindy,
Believe me I understand the challenges of teaching students and dealing with IT departments – my family is full of teachers and I’ve spent a fair bit of time working in schools myself to help them with technology. That really doesn’t excuse teaching them bad habits though. You need to consistently teach good practices and make sure the assessment criteria reflect that. IT departments are usually surprisingly flexible when you can show that they’re inhibiting the student’s educational outcomes but I understand the frustration, it does take a lot of showing.

There’s a whole other rant to have about schools being short-sighted and standardizing on a single platform. I know it’s easier from a system administration perspective but it completely fails to teach students the real skills they need to adapt to the software that they will use when they graduate – that software doesn’t exist today.

Anyway, I understand where you’re coming from, but don’t settle – stick to best practices and always teach the right way instead of encouraging compromise.

By: Mindy McAdams

Mindy McAdams — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 12:38:07 +0000

You’re right about the size of the browser window, of course — few if any people with greater than 1024 x 768 ever maximize the browser window. (I never maximize it on my MacBook Pro at 1440.) The benefit to using 1024 x 768 (or more realistically, 1000 x 550) as a standard is that you will accommodate the majority of the people using the higher resolutions. I see far too many Web sites (especially from beginning Web designers) with a height much too great to be viewed at 1024.

So first and foremost, I was trying to give those people a benchmark they can use. Obviously they look at sites using a different browser window size, and they are ignorant about how to accommodate the audience.

You might stop to think that it’s not possible to test in Safari on a Windows platform when you had to fight tooth and nail to get the school’s IT department to install Firefox in addition to IE, when the IT department wants everything to come from Microsoft. I’m also arguing with students who can’t seem to muster up the energy to test in both IE 6 and IE 7.

Your advice is good, but maybe you’re not accustomed to dealing with the students (and in some cases, newspaper Web designers) I am urging toward better practices. For them, their idea of testing is looking at it on their own single screen, in a single browser.

I actually had a woman tell me about a month ago — “No one uses Macs.” (Not one of my students, thank heaven.)

By: Asbjørn Ulsberg

Asbjørn Ulsberg — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 09:01:22 +0000

I completely agree with you. Mindy’s got it all (well, almost) wrong. And don’t forget the bunch of poeple sitting behind corporate proxy servers that filters away JavaScript, effectively rendering them as “invisible” visitors, at least for the screen-size statistics. And then you have the small bunch of people that use a console-based browser or don’t render the page visually at all. You better make sure your site is accessible to these too.