From fork-admin@xent.com Mon Sep 30 13:53:27 2002 Return-Path: Delivered-To: yyyy@localhost.example.com Received: from localhost (jalapeno [127.0.0.1]) by jmason.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A4CBF16F19 for ; Mon, 30 Sep 2002 13:49:15 +0100 (IST) Received: from jalapeno [127.0.0.1] by localhost with IMAP (fetchmail-5.9.0) for jm@localhost (single-drop); Mon, 30 Sep 2002 13:49:15 +0100 (IST) Received: from xent.com ([64.161.22.236]) by dogma.slashnull.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g8TErFg15436 for ; Sun, 29 Sep 2002 15:53:16 +0100 Received: from lair.xent.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4C3772940A9; Sun, 29 Sep 2002 07:53:09 -0700 (PDT) Delivered-To: fork@example.com Received: from mta5.snfc21.pbi.net (mta5.snfc21.pbi.net [206.13.28.241]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id B97682940A0 for ; Sun, 29 Sep 2002 07:52:35 -0700 (PDT) Received: from endeavors.com ([66.126.120.174]) by mta5.snfc21.pbi.net (iPlanet Messaging Server 5.1 (built May 7 2001)) with ESMTP id <0H3700J8CFZOE4@mta5.snfc21.pbi.net> for fork@xent.com; Sun, 29 Sep 2002 07:52:36 -0700 (PDT) From: Gregory Alan Bolcer Subject: Re: EBusiness Webforms: cluetrain has left the station To: FoRK Reply-To: gbolcer@endeavors.com Message-Id: <3D971165.1CA9D617@endeavors.com> Organization: Endeavors Technology, Inc. MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.79 [en] (X11; U; IRIX 6.5 IP32) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Accept-Language: en, pdf References: <3D95C839.8E8701FD@endeavors.com> Sender: fork-admin@xent.com Errors-To: fork-admin@xent.com X-Beenthere: fork@example.com X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.11 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Friends of Rohit Khare List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2002 07:42:45 -0700 X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-4.4 required=5.0 tests=AWL,EMAIL_ATTRIBUTION,KNOWN_MAILING_LIST,NOSPAM_INC, QUOTED_EMAIL_TEXT,RCVD_IN_MULTIHOP_DSBL, RCVD_IN_UNCONFIRMED_DSBL,REFERENCES,REPLY_WITH_QUOTES, T_URI_COUNT_0_1,USER_AGENT_MOZILLA_XM,X_ACCEPT_LANG version=2.50-cvs X-Spam-Level: Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote: > > Although it's like a total shock to 99.999% (5nines) of all the > employed website designers out there, the truth is webforms /can/ > accept "U.S. of A" as a country. Incredible, but true. Web forms can > also accept /multiple/ or even /free-form/ telephone numbers and can > even be partitioned into manageable steps. All this can also be done > without selling exclusive rights to your wallet to the World's > Second-Richest Corporation (assuming Cisco is still #1) and vendor > locking your business into their "small transaction fee" tithe. Ah, but you've just gotten to the crux of the situation. There's good design and bad design. There's good testing and bad testing. The problem is, anyone can design a good Web form, but nobody does. I think "best practices" hasn't caught up on main street Web enablement yet. There's some really great packages on how to do this stuff and in fact the usability people knew that Web forms needed to be fixed 5 years ago, so that's why we got XForms and XHTML. You can shoot yourself in the foot and people usually do. What the problem is, they don't even recognize that they're gimpy--ever. They just keeping trundling along making a mess of everything assured in their job security that they can build Web forms without even caring if they can be used or not beyond their test machine. If you had a piece of software and a security warning came out 5 years ago on it, would you run that software? Wouldn't you have patched or upgraded something so fundamentally broken 4 years and 11 months ago? What I want to know is why would someone use Web forms best practices from 5 years ago? I mean you can get a college degree in that time. Imagine if the next version of Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Linux forced you to use a tiled window manager? Sure, tiled windows were the best we had for a brief period of time, but they are completely useless except for some terminal based replacement applications. The bottom line is, if you can't get across the bridge, then it's broken regardless of whose fault it really is, and it's the business that needs to take responsibility as they are the ones that wanted to put the bridge there in the first place. Greg