Date   : Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:07:15 +0000
From   : robert@... (Rob)
Subject: New Retro Auction Website

Rich:  tried re-doing it, and I can see you are tinkering as things
keep changing!

Not sure why submit button isn't working, but it submits when I hit
enter on any field ....!   And don't you just hate web forms that
"lose" details like passwords and sccepting T&Cs when they refresh for
an error elsewhere, so you correct the faulty field and forget to
re-enter the passwords ....



On 18/12/2009, Rick Murray <rick@...> wrote:
>
> Wow - somebody uses Opera! :-)

Yep.. I find it much more reliable than any of the alternatives, at
least for my machine with my browsing habits.

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

Yup... I've not looked at the page source, but it looks like a case of
developers assuming certain behaviour from browsers rather than
specifying what they want to happen.

>
> 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).

As per most sites.  I get very used to pressing, e.g.
222222<tab>D<tab>etc for 25th Dec.

>
> The big danger with the date format as it LOOKS on your screenshot (too
> tiny to see properly),
It's full size, maybe your browser is squeezing it to fit it into your
page width or height?


>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?

lol always bugs me that - especially when you sidden realise that
"updated 1/12/2009" means it's actually nearly a year old..
thankfully there aren't that many professional sites that use
all-numeric dates any more, preferring "12 January"..

>
> 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. :-)

yes, I usually use yyyymmdd or some varient for dated filenames (e.g.
my local photos folders.)

>
> 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]

lol

>
> 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...)

I didn't get that far, and it's fixed now, but there are several
websites that have done that to me!  Just trying to think of one off
the top of my head, but what spring to mind was O2's mobile phone
online billing site - they did an update once, and it would come up
with an error mesage every time I logged in, barring me access to my
bills, until the helpdesk changed the spelling of my surname!

Another sign of a badly written website  ... "MS-SQL: Error near ' in
search query" or words to that effect ...

And as for websites that totally disallow an ' in the name  ... argh!
 I had support at one, once, say "we only allow ASCII characters in
our names, not foreign characters.  they soon got short shrift on that
one... and they fixed it ...

Rob.