[watwut]

Yes, but that is different situation.

I was specifically talking about situation where requirements are possible and not ambiguos. And where engineers starts "knowing" customer is wrong and keep knowing it despite it regularly turns out it was enginers lack of domain knowledge.

There is no trade off between these two situations.

I don't know what you mean by breaking html spec. Browsers keep it and we work either with it or around it?

[agentultra]

Ah okay, that makes sense.

re: HTML -- I've had strange requirements come in that required us to work around the HTML spec in order to get the UI to work they way they wanted. We eventually found a better solution...

but the point was that not all requirements are golden; sometimes the customer is plain wrong, ignorant, and stubborn.

[watwut]

Yes, I agree with that. It is not that customer is always right. But it is not that customer is always wrong either. We have to look at requirements, give them benefit of doubt, ask and listen to answers to figure out which are wrong.