Unfriendly and unhelpful websites
Time for a (mini) rant. This time it's websites, or rather the people who write them.If you're buying something on the web, you'll need to enter your credit card number. These are usually written on the card as four groups of four digits, with spaces in between, for example 1234 5678 9876 5432. However many of the card-processing systems provided by banks expect a continuous sequence of 16 digits, ie 1234567898765432.
Fair enough. The world is full of semi-incompatible systems (in fact if it wasn't, us Perl programmers would be far less in demand!) Now many web developers try to minimise the problems caused by sending card numbers with spaces to their processing houses by validating the details when you press "Submit" or "Buy" or whatever on the web page.
But -- and here's the ranty bit -- what really, really annoys me is when the validation then comes back and says "Please enter your card number without spaces". What? Why? If you're writing a small piece of javascript code to look at the card number, and to determine that it has spaces, it's about another 60 seconds to add in a bit of code to magically remove the spaces on the user's behalf. No need to throw up error messages or ask them to retype the number. Be helpful to the user!
Bloody computers :)
posted by Iain @ 09:34
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