Lazy Validation
The agency that handles my local taxes just made on-line filing available. I decided to take advantage of it Saturday. It was better than filling out a paper form and writing a check, but there was one annoyance.
When entering my W2, I only filled in the fields that contained values. I hadn’t even noticed that some of those fields had little red asterisks beside them. When I hit the submit button, a box was displayed with messages telling me which fields had to be filled in, and to enter zero amounts. This is reasonable, as they probably want to make sure that the fields were purposely left empty and not skipped.
So I went back and entered “0” in each of the fields. This time, the box displayed messages saying that the fields weren’t formatted correctly. They were expecting dollars and cents. I had to go back and enter “0.00” in each field. That’s lazy validation.
The real kicker came when, on the next screen, I entered a value, making sure to include “.00”. On that page, I was again told that the field wasn’t formatted correctly. It didn’t want cents. If you are going to be lazy about validation, you at least should be consistent about it.