I was in conversation today with someone who does business over the internet. They were grumbling that Americans keep entering dates in their web forms the wrong way round, so an event that’s supposed to be recorded as 11/12/04 gets recorded as 12/11/04 … and it’s impossible to tell when the month and the day has been transposed. Oftentimes, they receive irate emails complaining about missed reminders, and have to go into their database and manually swap the day and month over.
As I heard this, I was thinking what terrible user interface design… shouldn’t the months be represented as a drop-down (e.g. Jan Feb Mar, or January February March, or as a last resort 1-12)? Or shouldn’t there be some text on the page illustrating the correct format for dates?
And then it occurred to me why it seemed like such a strange issue to be having. … it’s not so much a user interface design problem as a web application framework problem. This sort of thing should be taken for granted in this day and age: the platform should silently provide a best-practice widget for capturing date information. The programmer or the person specifying the site really shouldn’t be bothering with this sort of detail.
This sort of thing provides a simple metric for evaluating your web frameworks. Do you have to think about the simple stuff, or does it come with sensible defaults, allowing you to tackle the real challenges such as business logic and integration?
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Well said that man. Though perhaps more to the point, even if the framework provides such functionality, the questions are (i) is it documented somewhere where you might actually find it if you went looking for it, and (ii) are one’s programmers clueful enough to go looking for it in the first place? I seem to remember, in the first few months of Y2K, seeing lots of CGI scripts telling me the year was 19100. strftime, anyone?