posted
Yet again, another annoyed user cuts to the heart of the problem.
quote: . . . several programmers wrote to me about how hard it is to come up with code in one of the website languages that will parse state abbreviations.
Well, boo-hoo. The whole point of being a programmer is that you write code that makes the website clear, convenient, and intuitively interactive.
Everybody here, raise your hand if you've been annoyed by this problem.
Well, there is hope. (albeit quite small) Programmers like myself, dedicated to perfection (edit) . . . scratch that . . . quality (/edit) rather than ease of creation, are hard to find, but we're out there. While I must admit it is quite **annoying** to make those dropdowns work correctly, it is not actually hard. I have personally done it several times.
Nor is it difficult to validate a 2 character limited text box against a list of valid state codes. I mean PLEASE . . . what with the AJAX tools now available, you could even validate the state code as the user types it! (or at least moments afterward)
Nope, the truth is, it's not that hard to do. We programmers are just lazy. It's dull, monotonous code that provides so little benefit and appreciation for the amount of work it takes that we just don't want to do it.
posted
I have to add this one point. I've been in computers since CP/m days and switched over to the PC in 1985. I've been a Microsoft Certified Software Engineer for years. I never knew that hitting a letter multiple times would take you to subsequent entries that match the first letter.
I know oodles and oodles of easter eggs in the Windows operating system, yet somehow this slipped by me. Anyone who would put down OSC for not knowing this is a ninnymuggin.
Posts: 16 | Registered: Nov 2003
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posted
I never knew the multiple keystroke method either. Although that's not much of a problem for me, as my state is the first in its letter group.
Posts: 973 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
Yeah, I've never heard of hitting the letter repeatedly, either. I've always had to use the mouse -- plus 50+ lines won't fit in a single pane of the pulldown menu so you have to scroll, etc.
Posts: 326 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
I think I may be one of the people who wrote to him to let him know that you could do the multiple N thing, but I can't remember if it was in a post or an e-mail, and if it was in a post, I can't find it.
posted
I'd be interested to see what he actually would think would be a good interface for this?
The ideal one would be a combo box - something you can type in that also has a drop-down list attached. These aren't available in web pages.
All the other ones I know of which are reasonably cross-browser compatible involve some kind of compromise which pisses off one user or another.
Frankly, I was never able to convince a customer to spend $500-$1000 to pay for developing anything for that. The few times it was brought up, I said it would take a day or so to come up with something, and they said forget it. I'd have loved to do it - it would have only taken one customer willing to pay and we'd have made it into a library routine. But we weren't going to eat all the profit on a small job for it. *shrug*
Unfortunately, the people who pay for a site get the final say on where developer resources are spent.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
In my own forms (for US clients), I use a module I wrote that compares a database of ZIP codes against a State field of two characters in length.
Yes, I require users to TYPE the two characters for the state. I find that it's actually faster than a drop-down, as OSC has postulated. And while I don't return a drop-down list on a validation failure, I'm now tempted to do so; I think his suggestion there was kind of inspired.
Javascript validation is performed to verify that a) the state exists and b) the ZIP code given is valid for the state. If both those pass, the entry is accepted.
It's fairly easy to plug this into any form, provided you have the database of ZIPs (and even then, that's only necessary if you want a higher order of validation than just validating against state codes).
I'm baffled that any programmer would write to him to tell him that this is hard. In my experience, almost every programmer I know already has modular code for collecting address information, and it's absolutely trivial to change the way the state code is entered.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
I don't think the programming is hard. I know lots of people who complain about the system you describe, though, and ask "why can't there just be a drop-down list?" And making them type or click something before that list appears is unacceptable to them.
I love coming up with UIs that please everyone. On the desktop, it was my specialty. On the web, it is harder to do and likely not worth the money.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:I know lots of people who complain about the system you describe, though, and ask "why can't there just be a drop-down list?"
Yes. But these people are stupid. Because since you fill out the entire form without using the mouse, and since modern browsers can autofill any text fields, using a drop-down list in a situation where a text field would be better -- like, say, anything that can be easily abbreviated/validated -- is completely unjustifiable.
(Now, believe me, I've had to bend over backwards occasionally to accomodate stupid people when designing something, but that has never stopped me from pointing out that they ARE stupid. *grin*)
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:(Now, believe me, I've had to bend over backwards occasionally to accomodate stupid people when designing something, but that has never stopped me from pointing out that they ARE stupid. *grin*)
Exactly. All I've tried to do is point out why such systems aren't in common use. Not why they shouldn't be in common use from a UI design system.
Maybe we should right a FireFox extension for OSC to select NC on state drop-down lists.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
...But you can't count on hitting "N" seven times, because sometimes they add Nova Scotia and Newfoundland into the mix.
And sometimes the dropdown is in alphabetical order by the original state spelling, (ie. NE, NV, NH, NJ..) and sometimes alphabetical by abbreviation (NC, ND, NE...)
In a rare case of Microsoft getting it right, they do use a logical typing system for entering states in MapPoint and Streets and Trips: You can type "N" "C" and get North Carolina, or can start typing "N" "O" "R" and get there as well. (But "NNNNNNN" doesn't get you anywhere, since there isn't a state called Nnnnnnn. At least not yet)
Posts: 258 | Registered: Jun 1999
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posted
Put me down for a ninnymuggin, then : If hitting 'N' takes you to the 'N' part of the list, then obviously hitting it again will cycle through the Ns. Honestly, what is difficult about this? Cycle-through-the-options is what hitting a letter does!
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
Speaking of web-form keystrokes that some of us never knew -- it wasn't long ago that I found out that 'shift-tab' will let you back up a field, just as tab goes forward.
Posts: 326 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by CRash: I never knew the multiple keystroke method either. Although that's not much of a problem for me, as my state is the first in its letter group.
Well, it doesn't "always" work in every implimentation. I have even seen one implimentation where the first letter takes you to the first word with that letter, then the second letter narrows the list even more to the one with the first "two" letters, etc. Imho, this is "far" less annoying that scrolling through 500 words, all with the same first letter, but its not the standard behaviour.
You want annoying.. Try finding an open source (or just sample code) for doing UTM to Latitude/Longitude conversion, which wasn't written in 1990 using Fortran and last updated in 2002, where they added, as near as I can tell, one extra if-then, to verify some output file to something. Some times it is lazy, sometimes it is not knowing how to do it, sometimes it is bad design in the bloody library in the first place, all too often in engineering and science, its that the morons are using a plain text editor to code 100,000 line projects with 50 contributors and no real debugger, because no one ever got out of the lab long enough to figure out that IDEs, step debuggers or code modification tracking software was invented 20 years ago.
Ever wonder why we are not already on Mars? Its probably because the guy with the one piece of techonology to make it happen is sitting in the lab trying to figure out why the critical simulation to test his idea won't run, after working on it for 10 years. The reason is probably because its got code from version 0.1, 3.5, 8.3 and 9.1 in it, when the oldest **working** code in the entire project is 8.6. Its just contributer A lost everything back to 0.1, B could only find 3.5 and C didn't even realize that D wrote an 8.6 version to replace the buggy one he wrote two months ago.
Read about that kind of insane nonsense in Dr. Dobbs recently. Frankly, I hope this isn't how the OS for our nuclear powerplants where written....
Frankly, a drop down that doesn't work right is the least of the stuff that irritates me. lol
BTW, anyone know VB and Fortran well enough to get the UTMS application from here:
to work right in VB. I have tried, twice. Something I keep screwing up. But then, Fortran looks like Chinese to me, so... Posts: 58 | Registered: Jan 2006
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posted
Pfft. Real Programmers code in emacs and type in the whole dependency list for gcc with each compile.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
Nah. Real programmers are intelligently lazy and understand that the machine is better at doing repeatable procedures than we are.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Well, I was joking about the makefiles, but I stand by emacs. IDEs make ugly code, and anyway, what's difficult about typing "!gma" to recompile? It's much more work to take your hand off the keyboard to hit a tiny button with the pointer!
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
Most modern compilers ALSO have documented keyboard shortcuts. The one I use requires a single keypress. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Some times it is lazy, sometimes it is not knowing how to do it, sometimes it is bad design in the bloody library in the first place, all too often in engineering and science, its that the morons are using a plain text editor to code 100,000 line projects with 50 contributors and no real debugger, because no one ever got out of the lab long enough to figure out that IDEs, step debuggers or code modification tracking software was invented 20 years ago.![[Wink]](wink.gif)
