Today i got a pleasant surprise. I had sent the following mail to care at irctc.co.in on 20th Aug.
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Dear Sir/Madam,
Let me take this opportunity to congratulate you on the excellent appeal of the website for www.irctc.co.in. The new colour scheme looks great and the site really appears pleasing. There are some problems as well. The site design has not taken into account a lot of desirable features which are considered mandatory on the internet.
1. The main page does not work with Firefox. Firefox is one of the most widely used browsers on the internet.It is very disappointing that a website of such high regard does not support Firefox.
2. If we see the validation of the site for W3C norms , it fails miserably.The validation service can be accessed from http://validator.w3.org/. The following are critical issues shown by the validator
a . No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8.
I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to reliably validate the document. I'm falling back to the "UTF-8" encoding and will attempt to perform the validation, but this is likely to fail for all non-trivial documents.
Read the FAQ entry on character encoding for more details and pointers on how to fix this problem with your document.
This shows the blank disregard for standards. Without solving this critical problem we cannot validate the site on other parameters.
If as another example we run the validator on http://www.irctc.co.in/helpandinfo.html We get 106 unique errors.
I recommend use of anybrowser ( http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ ) design recommendations accessible via the URL :http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/abdesign.html
3. Do not introduce blinking ads on any page of the website as they are really a pain on the eyes and do not serve any purpose.
This will help the web designers and administrators to make IRCTC.CO.IN http://irctc.co.in/ a very usable website for the entire country.
With the number of visitors going up by the hour its imperative that the largest employer in the world also listen to its humble customers. "
And am happy to see that they care. This definitely is something which was done after feedback from various people. The W3C validator still does not work , but they have done some checks on Firefox it seems,
Regards
Kanti