Yet another example where using and with zero JavaScript would be a better user experience. If you are going to write custom code you have to clear the minimum bar of what the browser provides.
Just Let Me Write Digits
31–40 of 89 posts
Re: Just Let Me Write Digits
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Read a bit further and the reason they had the issue was their uncommon keyboard layout, which is one that requires holding the shift key to access numeric digits. This broke the input filtering logic.
It's not uncommon it's used in France, which has a population of 66M (also Belgium). This is just a classic case of a developer situated firmly at the first peak of the Dunning Kruger graph.
From a worldwide perspective, it is incredibly uncommon, and just from the basics of this issue it is clearly uncommon in Switzerland as well. The standard keyboard layout in Switzerland is QWERTZ (across all of its language speakers). This website is generally only used by the Swiss.
I mean, if a basic authentication mechanism of a critical government website doesn't work with a keyboard layout, odds are incredibly likely that said keyboard layout is uncommon. Like not one of the developers, testers, stakeholders, or even other users had a problem -- and this isn't a problem you can just ignore -- so it probably isn't that big of a deal.
Re: Just Let Me Write Digits
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe, but I’ve searched for it many times out of curiosity, but have never managed to locate it online, and wouldn’t know if paper copies exist. From Wikipedia, I get to https://web.archive.org/web/20010204033600/http://publib.bou... That has one live link: https://web.archive.org/web/20010107084700/http://publib.bou... , but from there, the trail runs dead. Do you have a link?
This one maybe? https://archive.org/details/ibm-saa-cua-basic-interface-desi... PDF link in the box on the right.
Thanks! No pictures and way uglier than Apple’s HIG book, but much more than I ever found.
Re: Just Let Me Write Digits
#34I've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!
Especially in the UK, bank sort codes are typically presented to the user as e.g. 04-00-04 by every banking app or website, but whenever you have to enter them (e.g. to pay someone else) they usually require you to not enter the dashes. Some of the most annoying sites limit the input to 6 characters but don't strip out the dashes, so you'd end up with 04-00- and then it complains.
And then there are the ones that implement it as 6 separate boxes, and these are the only fields in the form that auto advance to the next field on input and also often break delete if you want to undo the previous digit.
Re: Just Let Me Write Digits
#35I've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!
a password with a space at the end would be broken in many systems.
Re: Just Let Me Write Digits
#36Same, but for dates. There's ; it's literally a solved problem ffs. Forcing to scroll through years, months and days in your remarkably creative date selection widget is extremely user hostile.
My pet peeve is in the "create a report" section of InvestEngine (useful for doing reports aligned to tax year). If you try to type a date at all, the year always ends up as 000n and no amount of typing numbers will get it to accept a 4 digit year (or even a 2 digit year starting 20). The only way to undo this state is to click today and then page through the years and months using the arrows on their stupid date widget.
Re: Just Let Me Write Digits
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
IBM CUA (1987) should be required reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
Maybe, but I’ve searched for it many times out of curiosity, but have never managed to locate it online, and wouldn’t know if paper copies exist. From Wikipedia, I get to https://web.archive.org/web/20010204033600/http://publib.bou... That has one live link: https://web.archive.org/web/20010107084700/http://publib.bou... , but from there, the trail runs dead. Do you have a link?
This appears to be a successor document: https://archive.org/details/common-user-access-basic-interfa...
Re: Just Let Me Write Digits
#38I've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!
In Canada our postal codes are formatted:
X#X #X#
Where X is a letter and # is a digit.
The amount of forms, even on government websites that can't do the unfathomably complicated logic of stripping the space if it doesn't want it is baffling.
Regarding your credit card example, in my password manager where I paste my credit card number from, I added a no-spaces copy of the number for me to paste in because practically every input on the internet accepts spaces but has a max character limit. So if I paste it in with the spaces, it'll cut off the last 3 digits, making me go back, delete the spaces, and manually type in my last 3 digits that were removed.
Re: Just Let Me Write Digits
#39> So statistically speaking I’m surprised that this bug hasn’t been noticed and fixed yet! I'm not so surprised, given that you cannot write support tickets if the bug prevents you from registering... Also, I don't think people have high hopes that a broken government website will ever get fixed.
Yes, for every time a bug like this is discovered and reported, there are probably hundreds of times when someone else just gave up or found a work around after much frustration.
I'm frequently astonished by how terrible and buggy modern software can get away with being and still survive. Working around bugs to accomplish what I need to accomplish is so normal to me now that I sometimes don't even notice how terrible the software is until I see someone less technically skilled than me try to use it.
Re: Just Let Me Write Digits
#40I've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!
It goes against Postels law, but it's much simpler and less error prone to only accept data in the representation you actually use for further processing, vs writing an ad-hoc parser and normalizer.