http://www.greatreads.com.au/the7deadlysins/competition1.htm

See the protocol on the front? On the page, net to the big verisign logo:

We guarantee that every transaction you make on our website will be safe. Our secure server software (SSL) is the best software available today for secure commerce transactions. It encrypts all of your personal information, including credit card number, name, and address, so that it cannot be read as the information travels over the Internet. When an order is received, SSL is again used to unscramble the message, check that it came from the correct sender, and verify that it has

Has what? It’s a mystery.

What is it with these half-baked web pages?

Webform, major financial group. I entered my phone number, only to be presented with an error message:

Contact Number is invalid. Contact Number can contain only numeric digits. There is no need to include a country code.

My crime? Putting in spaces. Heaven forbid that the computer strip them out again.

I have an ANZ Bank account. Using their website to pay bills is an exercise in frustration. I only have one account, but the website insists on me picking it out of a dropdown with two entries – the first one, the default, instructing me to pick an account. Failure to do so results in an error – “Please choose a From Account.” I only have ONE! Assume that’s where I want to pay from! Then one must pick who to pay, with an option to pick previous billers from a drop-down list. If you pick from the dropdown without javascript enabled, you get the error “Please select a biller from the drop-down list or enter a biller code.” – with javascript it fills in a few fields for you, but why does it even need you to fill those fields in if you’ve picked your biller already? Fill them in when I click the “I’m done” button!

Finally, we come to a bugbear I have with ANZ currency fields. You can’t enter a dollar amount, it has to include a decimal point with two following cents; they can’t infer from a lack of a decimal point you’re talking about a dollar amount. They inforce this rule on their website, and they insist that at an ATM you enter the number of cents you wish to withdraw from the ATM. Given the smallest unit of currency available from an ATM is $20, what is wrong with this picture?

Have a go at this crappy morgage calculator. Insofaras mortage calculators go, it’s middle of the road. It doesn’t allow for being an investor, which renders it useless to me – I have a substaintial investment income (only matched by my substaintial interest expense), and I’m not trading up from my current house.

But my biggest gripe is how the calculator has been “designed” to only work if you enter a valid, live email address. So this thing turns out to be a marketting tool, not a calculator per se. The address of me@example.com doesn’t work. If you enter an email address that isn’t live, it doesn’t give an error message – it barfs with an ASP error when sending the email fails. WTF? How is J Random User meant to figure that one out? Thankfully, it hands over the results (for what they’re worth) because jobs@google.com is a valid email address. Sorry about that, Google.

I love Snopes.com. It’s an invaluable resource for urban legends. Every time some idiot forwards me the latest fad email, I can debunk it (or, far more rarely, prove it isn’t true.)

I hate Snopes.com. Because they go out of their way to make their site fiddly to use. There’s popups that beat Firefox’s default blocker. If you click through to another site from their pages, it not only opens in a new window, but they try to hide its URL when you mouse over the link.

And they’ve got code that prevents you clicking or selecting on their page — so for instance if the browser gets focus in the address bar, you can’t click back onto the page to get the up/down keys working again. I guess it’s to stop you copy/pasting text off the site:

if (typeof document.onselectstart!=”undefined”)
   document.onselectstart=new Function (“return false”)
else{
  document.onmousedown=disableselect
  document.onmouseup=reEnable
}

… though right-click / Select All works (at least in Firefox). Right-click also works for getting focus back on the page, thankfully.

After much time swearing over how to get a table-like display out of CSS, I was stumped. All I wanted was an definition with the label on the left hand side and the text on the right, wrapped into a column.

And let me tell you: given my limited knowledge of it, wrestling with CSS is not my idea of fun.

Finally after scouring Google for various terms, I did a search for “hanging indents” which led me to a good way to do it using dd dt and dl tags, and appropriate CSS for each. Eureka! (Yes, if I’d thought about it, these tags are for “definitions”, precisely what I was trying to do.)

Thank you, the good people at Max Design.

Uh oh. Microsoft’s Support page needs support. The KB is broken.

Raymond Chen on why accessibility is not just for disabled people. It’s also of huge benefit to automation, for testing and integration purposes (including such diverse uses as screen scraping and speech recognition).

You bet. It’s the lack of consideration for this kind of thing that gives me my pathological hatred for web sites developed entirely in Flash, or some other mutant horror of leading-edge technologies. Too often you’ll find some whiz-bang heavy commercial ad-merchant has somehow got in control of the site design for some company that should know better, and rendered the whole site unusable…

• with the keyboard
• by the blind
• let alone the blind using keyboards
• by anybody without IE6
• or who has a popup blocker
• or likes to use the web in silence
• or is trying to get around the fact that the site has no RSS or web services or any other hooks, and is trying to screen-scrape/parse the HTML

Of course I can’t stop these idiots putting pages up. And they take no notice of anything anybody says about them. But in most cases I don’t have to do business with them.

One of the side-effects of sticking to accessibility and restraint in the technologies you use is that the designs tend to be more future-proof. While some web sites are breaking under Firefox, I reckon a lot more will break under IE7 when it gets pushed out to millions of XP users.

Want to see some HTML Form stupidity? Go to http://www.toysrus.com.au/site/signUp.htm and you get:

Radio buttons – users know what to expect from them. You can pick only one option. Not these puppies. These happen to be round checkboxes – that you can only turn on. You can’t turn them off! Oh, sure, there’s a “reset” button down the bottom of the form, but can you recall the last time you pressed the “reset” button on a form? I don’t think, in my many many years using the ‘net, I ever have. Not once. I have “reset button blindness”, and I imagine a bunch of others do too.

To top this off, because the site is mainly Flash, figuring out what the address of the page took a while. In the end I had to bookmark it to find it.

I guess that’s what happens when you get schoolchildren to build your website.

What to know what it’s like to use your site over dial-up? Use Sloppy – the slow proxy for dial-up modem speed simulation (slow down).

This guy’s gone to the trouble of finding out how to add “Did you mean?” to your own website’s search.

Kyle Scholz has developed code to represent Force Directed Graphs in Javascript, and you can interact with the nodes. We’re talking mathematical directed graphs here – you might know them as networks.

Basically, there’s a bunch of nodes and they settle themselves into a stable state minimizing tension between them – the graphs balance themselves out, and you can see it happening – it’s animated. And interactive – you can grab a node and move it around. It is ubercool.

Downside is that it sucks huge CPU.