Missing Features

When a website is needlessly complicated (and thus harder to use) there is usually a lazy programmer to blame.

Take the form on the Timeslips software registration web site:
http://www.timeslips.com/products/register/reg.asp
(Fill out the form with some dummy data and enter in a phone number like 5555555555.)

You will get this error on form submit:

You can’t submit the form until you enter a valid phone number. Problem is, you’ve entered a valid phone number.

If the programmer needs (or wants) the phone number in a certain format then the programmer should write the code to splice up and parse whatever you type in into the desired format.

The user should never be burdened, the programmer should. That is the programmer’s job: to code what can be predicted and parsed.

Regular expressions, while loops and conditional logic aren’t that hard to code. Try working with Apache mod_rewrite rules for a few hours and even linear algebra will become trivial.

Try looking at websites with this perspective and you will find a lazy programmer underneath most web sites you visit, behind most web forms you fill out and inside most of the software you use.

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