So today the roommate was filling out a form online, and he got done typing in all his pertinent information and hit send to hopefully zip is information safely away to its destination. When the page reloads he is greeted with an error message about a field having an invalid character, except it wasn't invalid at all. In fact it was completely necessary because his last name has an apostrophe in it (Irish, go figure) so it got me to wondering just how far overboard can you go with filtering out user input.
I can understand not allowing numbers in your first or middle name, but no apostrophes in the last name field? What about those who have hyphenated names? Quite likely they would get the same message if filling out this specific form. I myself run into similar things from time to time, however it tends to be when there is no suffix field on a paper form, then I have to ask whomever I am filling out the forms for if they have a way to differentiate me from everyone else who might share the same full name. Even in my own projects I have tended to go overboard in terms of input sanitizing however my code seldom is as widely deployed as others and is hosted on machines that don't have 24x7 staff to keep an eye on things.
Kind of makes me wonder just how many other places use a generic cleaner to scrub all input and inadvertently force users to either fudge their name to get past it or simply give up all together?
Still Think Its Not Crashing?
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Thats a steady and continual drop over 5 consecutive days of trading. Thats with news of the Bailout, with promises by both presidential candidates to fix the situation, even with interest rates being tweaked by Bernanke. This ship is sinking fast and its going to take down a couple hundred million people with it when it finally slips under the water. Anybody still doubting what this is needs to wake up to the fact that we are witnessing a market crash which will likely lead to the second Great Depression in this country. Get those tents ready folks, its going to be a frosty winter indeed.