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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Five buttons, all for spaces? That would already be a sign to me that whoever designed that UI wasn't really thinking straight...

And I'm almost willing to bet that not letting you enter spaces might be the result of a "security fix" because they pass the contents of that field, unescaped, directly through to a wifi configuration shell script, and someone doing some testing discovered that spaces would "cause things to break", so the solution was to disallow spaces instead of performing escaping on the password string.

Edit: while Googling around for some other devices that might have this interesting issue, I found... https://github.com/xbianonpi/xbian-package-config-xbmc/issue...

Why is escaping input such a difficult concept to comprehend?

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> Five buttons, all for spaces? That would already be a sign to me that whoever designed that UI wasn't really thinking straight...

It's a sign to me that they're extremely lazy, or their code is so bad that making small exceptions are very difficult/brittle.

http://imgb.mp/jvs.jpg

"Now that we're translating this UI to English, what do we do with all these buttons that aren't needed?" "Too much work trapping into the UI drawing code to hide them, let's just remap them to something else... how about space! That's harmless!"

I see what looks like the Japanese equivalents of single and double quote, full stop and comma, so it's still a bit puzzling why the English version doesn't have those there.

The "single and double" quote are actually Dakuten and Handakuten, which are essential parts of the language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakuten

Good point about the punctuation.

Yes five, maybe for unicode support?

no-break space U+00A0; zero width space U+200B; word joiner U+2060; ideographic space U+3000; zero width no-break space U+FEFF;

They all look the same tho.

From: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0020/index.htm

They are all regular regular ascii spaces (identical). The same number/positioning of buttons is shown no matter what language is selected on the camera. English doesn't need as many as Japanese, so they made the surplus buttons be space.

kalleboo posted a Japanese screenshot below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7620577

Spaces are fine in the SSID so they already had to cope there. I agree with your hypothesis that something probably went wrong in their dev/testing, and then they ran with it making things worse and worse.

Compounding things by keeping customers as far away as possible ensures that lessons are not learned.

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