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Just Let Me Write Digits

gendx.dev

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Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#51

Post by abanana »

fer wrote: post #20

Same, 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.

We had a discussion about this one not too long ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887957

Unfortunately, with the mobile OS's datepickers being so bad from a usability perspective, it's a long way from being a solved problem. Typing the date directly into a single textbox is great for some of us but not for others, so an alternative has to be provided.

Yes, some date selection widgets can be poorly designed and user hostile, but the well-designed ones tend to be fine. The ideal, based on real user research by gov.uk, appears to be to use 3 separate textboxes, instead of .

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#52

Post by whycome »

frou_dh wrote: post #22

I'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!

I have a keyboard shortcut to easily enter my email address. On certain forms it inadvertently adds an invisible space at the end. So many forms complain that I didn’t enter a valid email address. They should be ignoring or stripping any trailing spaces!

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#53

Post by dreamcompiler »

ralferoo wrote: post #34
frou_dh wrote: post #22

I'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 imp…

And of course you often cannot paste a 6-digit number into these fields. You have to type all 6 digits by hand.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#54

Post by david422 »

_bent wrote: post #40
frou_dh wrote: post #22

I'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.

APIs, yes - humans, no.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#55

Post by abanana »

llm_nerd wrote: post #32
K0nserv wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd understand a developer in e.g. America not being aware of it, but to one in Switzerland, France is right next door. A developer working on something as important as their government login system should be well aware of different keyboard layouts surrounding, and leaking into, their country.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#56

Post by whycome »

abanana wrote: post #43
RobotToaster wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing someone at some point thought that preventing copy and paste would stop bots, then everyone copied them.

That sounds quite likely. Not the stopping bots part, just the idea that someone chose to do it for some reason, and everybody copied them without knowing the reason. Happens all too often.

Describes religion. Code is a type of religion I guess

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#57

Post by dreamcompiler »

firmretention wrote: post #10
khalic wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former web dev here, you’re… right :-/ the only thing that angers me more than this pattern is when they decide to fuck up scrolling

My most hated one is not allowing me to right-click to open a context menu, or even worse, making right-click act the same as left-click, redirecting me to some page I never intended to go to.

Likewise usurping Ctrl-F with their own shitty global search function rather than the perfectly good page search provided by the browser. Looking at you, Confluence.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#58

Post by jandrese »

moring wrote: post #19

> 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.

It's been noticed, but nobody with access to the website has been told or cares. The author is almost certainly the first person to do a root cause analysis and come up with the solution though.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#59

Post by jandrese »

summarybot wrote: post #30
thaumasiotes wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Silent discards of the shift key also affect Programmer Dvorak as the numbers require it. That sounds... aggressively unergonomic. Are programmers not expected to frequently use numbers?

Actually programmers use the symbols far more frequently than the numbers. The number row on Programmer Dvorak is, from left-to-right, & [ { } ( = * ) + ] ! # Looks really weird at first glance! but if you try it out, [square brackets] and (parens) are symmetrical fingers on opposing hands. By hand, [] is the ring fingers (2,0 on a qwerty). {} is (3,4 on the left-hand) and () is 5,8 aka your pointing fingers, left ha…

> Plus, the numbers are also split by hand!

> From middle-going-out:

> Left hand: 91357 Right hand: 02468

What is the advantage of this order vs. numerical order? If I'm reading your post correctly the numbers are arranged 7531902468 on the keyboard, with maybe a space in the middle? Is there some mathematical property where odd and even numbers are more likely to alternate than for odds or evens to be found side by side? Maybe 0 is more likely to appear so they want it on an index finger? It just seems unlikely that the next most common digit is 9, unless this was developed by people who set prices on items.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#60

Post by jandrese »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #57
firmretention wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My most hated one is not allowing me to right-click to open a context menu, or even worse, making right-click act the same as left-click, redirecting me to some page I never intended to go to.

Likewise usurping Ctrl-F with their own shitty global search function rather than the perfectly good page search provided by the browser. Looking at you, Confluence.

Usually Ctrl-F still works for me, but / almost always gets consumed by the stupid search that never works properly. But then that's usually because you're on a site with infinite scroll so even the Ctrl-F search is going to be limited, even if you are in the correct thread.

One thing is really dislike about modern UI design is where you see a headline that seems kinda interesting but you don't click on it right away. Come back a bit later and it's just gone. There was some A/B testing on the headline and now it's completely different, probably now all clickbaity so I won't be inclined to check it out.

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