Why the Gov.uk Design System team changed the input type for numbers

Post by duxup » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 11:25 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #45

ChrisSD wrote: post #4

In summary the main issue is that, according to the spec, ` ` is only for numbers that are going to be parsed into a Javascript number. It has to make sense to increment, decrement or do other numerical operations on it. It's not to be used for strings or identifiers that just so happen to be numbers, e.g. credit card numbers. I'll admit this is slightly surprising to me but it does make a certain amount of sense. Th…

inputmode=”numeric” and inputmode=”decimal” have different quirks between Android and iOS. inputmode also acts differently on iPad and iPhone, and the keyboard shown varies from that for pattern=, and support for inputmode is missing from iOS11 (or iOS12?). Tread carefully! Note that type="number" is particularly horrible on iOS because it allows typing non-numeric values and then input.value just returns zero. Inste…

Post by lolc » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 11:35 PM UTC

ivanbakel wrote: post #44

rini17 wrote: post #24

This is another reminder that floating point numbers are just a hack that should never be used by default. We have enough CPU, memory and bandwidth that we are able to transmit/store exact representation of numeric user input, and convert it to float only when necessary, as designed by programmer.

Indeed. Just like 32-bit integers, having fixed size floats as the default representation of numbers with a decimal component is a bad holdover from days of limited hardware. Let programmers use floats when they have the performance analysis to justify it. Before then, it's just another kind of premature optimisation - and high level languages should be avoiding it.

Post by roel_v » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 11:47 PM UTC

BrianB wrote: post #78

dmix wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the reasons I love Stripe's checkout being used everywhere and designers elsewhere basically copying them. The internet is constantly getting better and I don't think we give that progress we've made in web design over the last few decades enough credit. Just imagine how bad it used to be to just purchase a simple thing on an ecommerce site in the mid 2000s. Or remember what car websites used to look li…

> Or remember what car websites used to look like vs what they look like now. lingscars.com ?

Post by reaperducer » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 11:59 PM UTC

dylan-m wrote: post #83

ChrisSD wrote: post #4

In summary the main issue is that, according to the spec, ` ` is only for numbers that are going to be parsed into a Javascript number. It has to make sense to increment, decrement or do other numerical operations on it. It's not to be used for strings or identifiers that just so happen to be numbers, e.g. credit card numbers. I'll admit this is slightly surprising to me but it does make a certain amount of sense. Th…

That's a good rule of thumb there :) More pedantically, credit card numbers _aren't_ numbers in the first place. They are identifiers that happen to use numerical digits. Same as phone numbers. Treating them as numbers at any point in a system is an error. My dream is this detail of the HTML spec forces people to rethink their schema design while they're at it.

Post by jniedrauer » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 12:09 AM UTC

drstewart wrote: post #53

vitaliyf wrote: post #30

Similarly, here is your reminder than US Zip Codes aren't numbers, because many of us here in the Northeast have them start with a zero (or even two). So don't store them as integers, because Boston is 02108, not 2108. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ZIP_Code_prefixes

My general rule is if you can't add two values together then they shouldn't be represented as number types.