Re: Problems with ? in URL and IE6 conditional statements

Mark McDonnell wrote:

> My client works for the South-East Council and they have to have the
> W3C validation icons displayed on the site as they are a council
> organisation.

Does some higher authority require a) validity or b) display of W3C 
validation icons? The former requirement is a bit formalistic, but 
understandable, whereas the latter (especially when not combined with 
the former! :-) ) is outright clueless. The icons are just distracting 
crap to users; for more info, check 
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/validation.html#icon

> But no matter how much I explain to them that the above
> two problems will not affect users in any way they refuse to listen
> to reason.

Well, your explanations are not reasonable then. Apparently you didn't 
even know why the validator the issued the warnings, so how could you 
know something far more complicated like the _total_ effect of the 
constructs that triggered them? By "total", I mean the effect across 
browsers and browsing situations now and in the future.

> I don't know if the W3C offers the helpful service of lets
> say emailing me with words of the effect of "our validator is no
> substitute for real world user testing"?

Probably not. But I can hereby email you that your guess on the effects 
of invalid constructs is no substitute for real world user testing _or_ 
for validation.

Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Saturday, 2 February 2008 08:52:07 UTC