Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

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I'm going to take this opportunity to list a few of my biggest web develeper peeves

1. Forms that auto change fields

99% of the time using a computer tab goes to the next field so it's muscle memory to press tab after filling out each field. Then some dumb add web dev decides that for zip code, once I enter 5 digits he'll automatically move me to the next field. This has at least 2 problems. Either my muscle memory had already moved me one field too far or, I made a mistake on one of the last digits and backspace does nothing because it's been moved to the wrong field.

2. Credit card or phone number fields that require a certain format

Many sites insist on 1111222233334444 or 1112223333. Entering 1111 2222 3333 4444 or 1111-2222-3333-4444 and they complain. Just filter out the digits on submit or on the server! Stop making me do things the computer can do so easily.

3. Auto formatting fields

Stop trying to be clever with a form that shows one field that looks like (111)223-3333 but doesn't let me type the (, ), or -. Apply #2 above. Stop messing up my keyboard usage by making it different than every place else I type.

4. Forms that ask for city, state and zip code

Ask for the zipcode first and then fill in the city and state (the let the user change them)

What are your web dev pet peeves?

Unfortunately, your credit card format may not be a problem with the webmasters, but the lawyers. I worked on credit card processing applications once upon a time. We were contractually obligated by our clearinghouse (First Data Corp) both to only submit credit card numbers in the exact format they were provided by the user, and also without spaces or dashes. So while it's a stupid limitation, it may not be the faults of web developers everywhere.

This was true a decade ago and may have changed, but that industry can be pretty slow to update.

Amazon.com seems to get by without messing with credit card input forms.

"What are your web dev pet peeves?"

That would require way too much typing.

How about we just say: Adobe Flash. Worst thing to ever happen to the web. It was the MIME killer. And it was all for nothing. Adobe themselves killed it, it was so bad.

Of course, web devs _loved_ it.

Remember, swf means small web file.

Forgive me if you're kidding.

Designers and game devs loved Flash, but web devs hate(d) it. The only cool thing about it from a web dev perspective was Actionscript, but this was before Javascript was cool. You could also do long polling with it, but not many people did – anyway, this was really something that game devs loved, not web devs.

"Swf" is for ShockWave Flash; swfs are notoriously large. One of the hallmark of Flash files was the ubiquitous loading screen.

Forms that hook keyboard events to do different actions to what you might expect.

For example, I was using a payment form recently. There was a <select> list for choosing my country, now I like to use keyboard as much as possible so I filled out the form by tabbing between the fields.

The normal way a select field should work is that arrow keys navigate the list and enter selects the current value.

Unfortunately the developer had hooked the enter key to submit the entire form.

Took my about 5 attempts to make the payment because I kept instinctively hitting enter to select the country before the form was completed.

i've always asked for country and zip code first. then ajax-filled (if i have a db table for it) the city/state/province into fields below.

addresses are strange. humans think of addresses in little-endian terms because to them the rest is implicit, while computers and filtering works better big-endian where no assumptions can be made in advance. meh.

addresses are strange. humans think of addresses in little-endian

No, this is culture-specific. In Russia, postal addresses are written exactly the opposite ("big endian") way.

It's much harder than it looks. "Forms that auto change fields" are all I want when I'm filling in payment details using my phone; instead I have to leave the keyboard and attempt to hit a tiny input every now and then.

If it does make for a better experience on mobile they could change behaviour based on viewport size, although that might confuse someone that expected it to behave the same on mobile and desktop. And anyway, don't you have a tab key on your phone's soft keyboard?

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