[Gllug] OT: Police Web Site

[Walter Stanish]

>> Walter Standish seems to have output a fair screenful on the
>> assumption I said it _should_ not accept lowercase, which I didn't.

To the notion "entering a postcode in lower case as incorrect" you
responded "It still _is_ incorrect".  Apologies if you were hair-splitting
without a point... naturally, I had assumed you were making one.

>> All I'm saying is, if you choose to input a postcode incorrectly, it's
>> really a bit thick to whine that the designers didn't happen to
>> anticipate you making this particular mistake.

Perhaps you are confusing designers and programmers?

The thread seems to center around programming and not the
ability of a designer (visual creative type) to think logically around
notions such as character set equivalence, server vs. client side
validation, options available from CSS vs. javascript, security,
etc. that competent web UI implementations require.

If the user has to whine then it is a strong suggestion that
the implementation failed produce an adequately usable
system for that user.  This may be a problem of
requirements definition ("We're dealing with idiots, here.",
always a safe assumption), of scope change ("the
user base now includes idiots") or of honest to god
programmer laziness ("I couldn't be bothered adding
a single 'i' character to the end of my regular
expression").  It is nonsense to suggest that the user is
wrong, because they are a user and it is a programmer's
job to anticipate and guide them.

>> If they had anticipated
>> it, good for them, but that they didn't is not really indicative of
>> gross incompetence.
>
> I agree entirely.

I disagree. A web system is almost always a public facing
system. If there's one thing that programmers should learn
quickly, it is to expect unexpected input from users.  This
is not just a usability, but also a security concern.

Good programmers and clued-up designers know this.

> Accept whatever the user provides.  Parse it and put
> it into canonical form (not necessarily in that order).  You can always
> feed back the canonical form to the user.  Now process the canonical
> form.

How about:
 - CSS uppercase it
 - validate client-side with a case insensitive javascript regex
 - normalise post-submission on the server side, with
   additional client-side handling for the case of server-
   issued data rejection

- Walter
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