An HTML attribute potentially worth $4.4M to Chipotle

In the race to use fancier and fancier tools to make web user interfaces go I think we loose out a lot by avoiding the browser's inbuilt support for these things.

Like how eBay's new search feature does not allow me to click in it and type in one motion. I have to click, wait for it to redraw without the magnifying glass, and then click again to put the cursor where I wanted it, before editing the query.

Or how some sites hijack the scrollbar, or muck with it, or how about that endless scroll that gets mucked up every so often and you gotta start over.

I suppose web programmers need something to do.

I have still never encountered a perfect masking implementation for the web. I don’t believe that they exist. If you think you know of one, please tell me and I’ll see how many seconds it takes me to find bugs in it. Normally it’s less than ten. I’ll be mightily impressed if someone can present me with one that I can’t find bugs in.

Masking is generally surprisingly user-hostile. It’s better to instead take arbitrary user input and make sense of it after the fact—if you want to reformat the value they’ve entered, you might be able to get away with doing that after they blur the field (though even then there are often downsides to doing it), but I believe it’s genuinely impossible to accomplish in a side-effect way before then, across all devices. (It’s not easy, but possible to do it for desktop; but various mobile keyboards are particularly weird and do all kinds of crazy things if you meddle with the value while typing.)

I’m talking about the web specifically here. It’s possible to do things properly outside the web, but the web just doesn’t give you quite the right tools for bug-free implementations of masking.

I would doubt that it really results in lost orders as people have already invested a lot of time by selecting their food choice and by that time are hungry.

Not everyone will understand that the problem is related to their autofill not behaving properly - it's not too far fetched to think that after trying to submit a few times, that someone would abandon their efforts because the "site isn't working". Probably not as high of a lost revenue as proposed, but I wouldn't doubt it leading to some lost orders.

I hate the way companies try to do custom formatting and validation as you type. It breaks form handling in many different and exciting ways and pretty much ensures that autofill (or even just copy/paste) will fail.

If you must do client-side massaging of form data, at least wait until the user has pressed Submit before messing with the form's contents. And don't assume that the keypresses are the only way your inputs will change.