Re: FN-FORUM: Opinions on W3C validator

date posted 24th September 2007 11:56

On 24 Sep 2007 11:22:15 -0000, aidan wrote
> I couldn't disagree more strongley on that statement. Usability and
> standards go hand in hand.

Agreed. But I also stand by what I said in my original post - they are not
necessarily the same thing. You can have a usable site that does not conform
to standards and a site which does that is completely unusable.

>I've seen situations plenty of times
> where someone has rattled together a site that looks fine in IE, but
> is completely all over the place in safari, mozilla and pretty much every
> other browser out there.
>
> In this case, how is the site useable? Obviously it's not.

Again I agree. But you can create a site usable on all the above platforms
and find that is is still not fully compliant. In that case (and in every
case) usability trumps standards. It is up to you to define usable for
particular situation of course.

> IE may
> be on a good proportion of computers out there, but of those
> computers with it on, you'd be surprised at the amount of people who
> prefer Opera or firefox.

Agreed. I prefer Firefox over IE but this is not a browser war post its a
usability versus standards post and I say usability wins if one must yield
to the other; but if you can do both then great.

--
Gary Short
http://www.garyshort.org