[Gllug] OT: Police Web Site

[Mick Farmer]

On Fri, 2011-02-04 at 06:10 +0000, David Damerell wrote:
> On Thursday, 3 Feb 2011, Alain Williams wrote:
> >On Thu, Feb 03, 2011 at 10:02:39AM -0800, Walter Stanish wrote:
> >>The summary is that, at least when dealing with users, rigid
> >>rule-following (especially when accompanied with chest-beating
> >>and assertions about correctness) rarely helps anyone.
> 
> Fortunately the person who implemented it made no assertions about
> correctness that I noticed.
> 
> >	"Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept
> >	from others." 
> >Jon Postel
> 
> Quite. For example, when inputting a postcode, be conservative; use
> uppercase.
> 
> Walter Standish seems to have output a fair screenful on the
> assumption I said it _should_ not accept lowercase, which I didn't.
> 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. If they had anticipated
> it, good for them, but that they didn't is not really indicative of
> gross incompetence.
> 

I agree entirely.  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.

Regards,

Mick

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