Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

Usable Permalinks

Saturday, June 24th, 2006

Speaking of usability *cough*, I’ve changed the permalinks to be a useful URL. Gone are the days of linking to “?p=123″!

Pointless Webapp Errors, 1st Ed.

Saturday, June 24th, 2006

Here’s a worthless error. Either I’m missing some small detail about the potential for HTML or Javascript injection on the client side, or this eBay error you get when you’re composing a message to someone is really, really stupid:

[Message may not contain HTML, asterisks, or quotes]

HTML I can understand for the privacy/security of the intended recipient of the message, but what about asterisks and quotes? Why would you want to restrict something as common as quotation marks in a message?

Which leads me to my first law of form validation:
Don’t prevent people from typing something they might normally type.