I just tried to fill in an online form and I typed in my details (actually I pressed a little button on the Google toolbar that filled most of it in for me. Marvellous…) then submit.
The form popped up a warning dialog telling me to fix my postcode. It then highlighted the postcode field and in red letters next to it was the phrase ‘Spaces are not allowed’.
I did wonder whether it would have been less effort for the programmer to simply remove the spaces for me then to go to all that trouble… I can’t think of any technical reason why it wouldn’t be easier to strip the spaces from the postcode field than it is to go through all that validation and error message business.
I just started writing a rant about how developer packages (like dreamweaver) should offer palettes of standard forms like this, with usable validation feedback. This would avoid reinventing the wheel badly. It reminds me of exactly the problem of early versions of Flash that didn’t offer decent scroll-bar widgets so developers had to build their own from scratch. Every website would have infuriatingly different scroll bar widgets, each with their own shortcomings.
Have you seen this form builder tool?
Oh. Don’t get me started on Flash UI’s. I’m saving that one for when I’m in a really bad mood :)
Postcodes are nothing. What about credit card numbers? They’re *printed* with spaces, so you can read them. How many 16-letter words do you know? No one can read a 16-digit number without some kind of grouping. Commas, dots, hyphens, spaces, all make fine separators.
Yet, when we’re entering a credit card number into a web form, we’re almost universally expected to enter 16 digits without spaces, without any aid to help us verify the number is correct, or even that the right number of digits were entered. Gee, guys, it’s only money, you know?
All because some webhead hasn’t learned basic UI rules, and arrogantly thinks his customers should provide their data in a form convenient to him. Never mind that he has to verify the data and produce the error messsage, and that at least some of his customers will go away.
I can go one better than that.
I just tried to log in to a site with my email address, and it gave me an error because I had copied and pasted it, with a space after the final character of the email address (so instead of ending with .com, it ended with .com followed by a space).
The error message was ‘please enter an email address’.