Date   : Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:37:24 +0100
From   : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: New Retro Auction Website

Rob wrote:

> registration page looks an absolute mess in Opera 10:

Wow - somebody uses Opera! :-)

That's quite a mess, indeed. Or, a case of "oh look, a messed up table 
width (again)".


> What's with the pop-up calendar for entering birth date?

That's strange. Why not a drop-down list with 1-31, Jan-Dec, 19xx-2010 
(although I don't expect newborns to be registering, honestly).

The big danger with the date format as it LOOKS on your screenshot (too 
tiny to see properly), is that Americans and Europeans use different 
formats which for half the month look identical. Or have we all at least 
worked out that "9/11" isn't a chilly November day?

FWIW, I use a slashed version (can't stand dash separators) of ISO8601, 
or yyyy/mm/dd, on the basis of major-part-first. You can't have slashes 
in filenames, so I just run all the numbers together, like on my b.log 
where files have names like 20090118.html and without me doing a bit of 
work, the files will all be correctly sorted by date order. :-)


 > And defaulting to today?

I'd love to say "Haha, that's stupid!" but instead I'll say:
   If not today, when?
There is no 'correct' day. At least using drop-down list items, you can 
include default 'dummy' entries, like:
   [ -- ] [ -- ] [ -- ]
or be patronising with:
   [please] [select] [date]


> It errored when I cancelled it and typed in date, with "incorrect date
> format"

Mmmm, really it is best to stay away from string dates and just use 
separate fields and combine at the end _only_ for display.


 > and on the refresh, had an \ in front of the apostrophe in my
> surname.

Mmmm, the escaper isn't too smart. I trust it is the generic PHP library 
  routine "stripentities()", because it seems daft enough. I wrote a 
routine for my b.log code as stripentities() was so manky.

I wonder if you hit refresh AGAIN would it have said \\\' ?
(and then \\\\\\\' then \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\' and so on...)


Best wishes,

Rick.

-- 
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...
 >> TO PRIVATE MAIL ME, REMOVE [BBC-Micro] FROM SUBJECT <<