In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 05/11/2008
at 02:25 PM, David Alcock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>Subject: Mainframe programming vs the Web
Versus? It's perfectly feasible to serve web pages on z/OS.
>Ever since the Web came along I've been annoyed by those web sites that
>won't accept spaces or dashes like for credit cards and phone numbers.
>I know that even ancient mainframe COBOL has support for removing them
>with one command. I see that it's just pure laziness as I suspected
>all along:
Never attribute to laziness what can be explained by incompetence or by
managerial fiat.
IAC, there is nothing about, e.g. *bsd, Linux, Intel, SPARC, windoze that
requires writing poorly designed web pages with hostile user interfaces.
Google for Tufte[1] for some principles that, while not intended for the
web, are still quite relevant.
BTW, removing optional spaces and hyphens from a credit card number is a
simple one liner in Perl and similar languages. It's not the platform,
it's the implementors.
[1] Who, IMHO, should be mandatory reading for anybody presenting
data to human viewers.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO
Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
