alt Hacker NewsI'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!
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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 implement it as 6 separate boxes, and these are the only fields in the form that auto advance to the next field on input and also often break delete if you want to undo the previous digit.
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!
In Canada our postal codes are formatted:
X#X #X#
Where X is a letter and # is a digit.
The amount of forms, even on government websites that can't do the unfathomably complicated logic of stripping the space if it doesn't want it is baffling.
Regarding your credit card example, in my password manager where I paste my credit card number from, I added a no-spaces copy of the number for me to paste in because practically every input on the internet accepts spaces but has a max character limit. So if I paste it in with the spaces, it'll cut off the last 3 digits, making me go back, delete the spaces, and manually type in my last 3 digits that were removed.
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.
a password with a space at the end would be broken in many systems.
> Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!
This is one of my most hated categories of pet peeves, software that does something in a way that causes a human to have to expend effort every time they use it which could easily be fixed by one-time effort on the developer's part, but the developer is either uninterested or hostile to the idea of fixing it. Computers exist to do the tedious stuff for us, if software makes us do tedious stuff for it that could be avoided with a bit more work on the software side then the software is wrong.
"Enterprise" software on Windows that "requires admin" has been a long time top subcategory here, where in literally 100% of cases I've ever dug in to in 20+ years of professional IT they could change a couple of default paths to point either within the user's private folders or a common user-accessible folder like ProgramData and solve it forever, but instead they tell people to give everyone local admin and people who don't know better actually listen to that idiocy while competent administrators are forced to fire up ProcMon and track down what it's doing so they can bodge around it by pushing out permissions changes or config changes through their management platform of choice.