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Posted by Harlan Messinger on 10/19/58 11:57
[top-posting corrected]
Whit wrote:
> Harlan Messinger wrote:
>> I'm curious about the bigger picture, and about why it would be
>> desirable to have the transformation occur while the user is typing. Why
>> not just convert it at the server when the form is submitted? Is the
>> idea that you expect the user to type a whole sentence, and you intend
>> to correct it? What is someone types "my name is bob becker"? Is
>> converting it to "My name is bob becker" going to be satisfactory? Will
>> you add a period on the end if the user omits it?
> Here is the problem in a nutshell:
>
> Think about a company name. It should have capitalized names, like:
>
> Bella's Sandwich Shop.
>
> I want to help the lazy user toward that structure so that if they
> never cap, or worse, keep the caps lock on, then it will be entered
> correctly.
If the user is too lazy to care how his business is listed, isn't that
his problem?
> However:
>
> Sometimes things shouldn't be managed in that way, like:
>
> Bob's Adult Video XXX.
Not to mention "Dan and Sam's Grill", where the "a" in "and" is
*supposed* to be lower case.
> The formatting must be turn-offable so that doesn't become 'Xxx'. So my
> goal is to create this field which auto-corrects, but that people can
> turn off if it becomes annoying. Also I would like to avoid server load
> and the trouble of refreshing.
The processing necessary to adjust the casing of a short string of
characters is utterly negligible. This isn't 1980.
> I pictured a Word-like assistance in
> formatting. (Except that it is easy to turn off ... :D)
Well, Word is an enormous, sophisticated piece of software, and even
Word doesn't title-case phrases with "xxx" or "and" correctly. Any
corrections you can add will handle only a subset of the problems, and
may produce as many errors as it fixes. And on top of that it will
disconcert the user if you do this while he's typing. And then you plan
to give the user a way to turn it off if it's annoying (or, more
precisely, if it replaces correct entries with incorrect ones) so now
that's one more thing the user has to figure out. IMO you're adding a
lot of complexity only to achieve a hit-or-miss result.
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