13-digit ISBN required, without hyphen

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Every time you see a message like this from a web site, a programming angel falls from the sky and is imprisoned on earth until he can get the programmer who wrote that code to stop being a lazy so-and-so. Do you realize how easy it is to strip a hyphen out of a string of text?

Programmers: accept any reasonable format, and change it for the user into the format you need!

Comments

  1. Crosbie1:36 PM

    Your comments on user interfaces have been excellent. A good general rule is 'never ask the user for information you already have!' Supermarkets now have very useful self-scan checkouts. My particular bugbear is when I insert my debit card to pay, instead of going ahead and initiating the transaction (which is not final - I still have to enter my pin) - the checkout detects I have inserted my card and tells me to 'Select card payment' . Aaaaaaak

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah2:02 AM

      Thanks. Yes, that is annoying!

      Delete
  2. shonk2:45 PM

    It's not even laziness, really: as various people have pointed out (e.g.), it's probably more work to create the error message than it is to normalize the input.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Andy9:46 PM

    Well, it's more work if you already know how to do it. If you're learning programming while making your first website, it's easier to write warnings.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah2:01 AM

      Well, I'm hoping the programmers who were creating my book order form were not novices!

      Delete

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