Jun
15
2005“No Dashes or Spaces” Hall of Shame
15
2005
Someone has created an entire gallery dedicated to a usability flaw that has baffled me for ages. It’s the “No Spaces or Dashes” requirement often found on sites where you need to enter your credit card, phone number, or other type of numeric data generally broken into groups of digits for readability.
There is absolutely no reason any web form should ever have this requirement. Ever. In any remotely modern computer language, removing spaces and dashes from a string requires no more than two lines of code. In perl, it can be done in less than 20 characters. I challenge anyone to propose a legitimate reason for requiring a human to enter data in a no-spaces-no-dashes format. There is none whatsoever, aside from extraordinarily lazy programming.
Man, you would probably had a heart attack if you looked under the hood of most sites and saw what passes for form validation.
It is appalling, really.
hink 6/16/05 @ 2:38 am