Am 07.04.2010 01:28 schrieb Eduard Pascual:
Maybe I'm being too hasty with this idea but, since machines don't
really need the same readability aids as humans do, I'd suggest that
the UA simply removes everything other than "+" and alphanumeric
characters (and obviously adds nothing) when sending the field.
I would actually expect sanitizing phone numbers to be done by the
applications that use the numbers rather than by the application that
collects them. If I collect a phone number and store it in a database,
there might be several usages for them, e.g.:
1. Print out a list of numbers for manual dialling
2. Show a user record on screen, dial manually
3. Show a user record on screen, the phone number is linked for
automatically invoking Skype or whatever application on click
4. Export phone numbers to an external application
For usages 1. and 2., the machine-readable sanitized number format might
be a hassle, the unchanged user format will be preferred. Also, if a
user loggs in to any application and is prompted to check her/his user
data, the phone number will be expected to be shown in the same format
as entered.
That's why I think phone numbers should be submitted unchanged in any
case. Even for validation purposes, locale-based patterns are likely to
be a problem, e.g. if you try to enter your US-phone number from an
internet cafe in Bombay.
