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From: Gregory Alan Bolcer <gbolcer@endeavors.com>
Subject: Re: EBusiness Webforms: cluetrain has left the station
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Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2002 07:42:45 -0700

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


