I read threads like this all the time: someone talks about "non-technical users" or "your grandma" or "pointy-haired bosses" or the like, and then goes to great length to discuss, in detail, the capacities or cognitive styles or knowledge base of members of these hypothetical categories.
It all seems like a bunch of arbitrary assumptions.
I don't know about anyone else's experience, but these assumptions are pretty dead-on in my own personal experience. Non-techies(my mom, or somebody who only uses home computers for email & turbo-tax and some super-locked-down PC at work) don't have a clue what/how it's doing what it does. The blue "E" on the desktop is the internet, sometimes it's even the whole computer when they say "My computer doesn't work". They most _definitely_ don't have a clue what HTML or javascript is, or what that blue "e" on their desktop is. That being said, not to come off as some arrogant know-it-all, I admit I know very little about how my car works. I just take to the dealer and do the suggested maintenance. I'm sure I'm paying more than I should somewhere but I don't care... however, I'm starting to think it's more dangerous not to know how a computer and the internet work than it is to not know how your car works.
The "non-technical" user is real, in my experience. I worked tech support at a school where the teachers at the school would accidentally delete icons on their desktop and change every setting in the browser one day trying to print something. I've also volunteered as in-person support at Firefox events. Watching people bring in their computers full of crapware and with things modified all to hell before they finally asked for help. These people aren't dumb, they just lack the technical literacy sometimes. But they are most certainly not hypothetical.
