98% isn't very much · WhyNotHugo (雨果)98% sounds like a lot. If someone wins the lottery 98% of the times they play,<br>they are clearly blessed. Getting a top mark (e.g.: 10/10) on exams 98% of the<br>time will likely lead to an honour diploma.<br>But a restaurant where clients don’t get of food poisoning 98% of time is<br>getting people sick on a monthly (or even weekly) basis. If an employer pays<br>their employees 98% of the times, I definitely wouldn’t want to work there. If I<br>pay before leaving a restaurant only 98% of the time, I’ll be in trouble.<br>98% is great for exceptionally good things, like dramatically increasing<br>someone’s quality of life, but very low for basic expectations, like a baby<br>surviving a babysitter taking care of them.<br>If a website uses fancy new browser features and works for 98% of the<br>population, that means that it won’t work for ~150 million people. If a website<br>makes a change and that works for 98% of their visitors, they’re basically<br>kicking out 2% of their audience. Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to<br>former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”?<br>98% of the population might not imply 98% of my audience either: something might<br>work for 98% of the general population out there, but only for 70% of my actual<br>audience.<br>Just a few months ago the topic of nested CSS came up. Somebody pointed out that<br>it is standard since 2023 and safe to use online. I also checked the exact<br>browser distribution of a client’s website (where I would by happy to trim out<br>the scss pipeline). Over the last year, only ~70% of the visiting browsers<br>supported the new CSS features. Even thought this feature is “widely supported”<br>in a general audience, for my audience, it left out 30% of the visitors.<br>You probably know one hundred people. Picture two of them staring at a broken<br>screen. The 98% statistic is a lazy shortcut. Truly robust engineering isn’t<br>about what works for most; it’s about gracefully handling the edge cases. If a<br>fancy new feature can’t degrade gracefully, then 98% isn’t “widely supported”.<br>It failed to meet the basic minimum for 2% of the people out there.
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