Web Log Costa Blanca

This is my third post on Web forms. All Web designers and Web developers have to work with forms. I am not so much offering tips and techniques (though I have done). Rather, I am trying to get designers and developers to abandon provincial customs and wake up to the modern globe.

So I have attacked the dreadful custom of asking for ‘First names’ and ‘Last names.’ And I have put in a protest against the illogical American system of numeric dating. In this post, I tread on even thinner ice: is it ‘sex’ or ‘gender’?

In modern English and American Web forms, this not only reflects a misunderstanding of the original radical purpose behind the use of ‘gender’, it also stifles that very purpose. From being a mind-changer, it has become a system-enforcer.

In many (maybe most?) of the languages of the world, gender is a critical feature. Articles, possessive pronouns, adjectives, and so on, all have to agree with the gender of the noun. If you are speaking Spanish, you have to know that a tie (una corbata) is feminine, and a dress (un vestido) is masculine.

This gender is quite arbitrary, as my examples suggest. So radical thinkers in the early days of structuralism extended this to masculinity and femininity generally. There were no given masculine qualities or feminine qualities. It was all arbitrary.

A liberation, which led to much ‘gender-bending.’ A liberation for all of us, men as well as women. And then one day some English speakers got hold of this idea, and not understanding its origins in the grammar of other languages, decided that using ‘gender’ instead of ‘sex’ would show everyone that sexes are also arbitrary.

You might applaud the thinking behind it. However, its net effect has been to freeze what had been fluid. You can now ask people for their gender on a Web form. So it’s fixed.

You have to be an English speaker, and not very good with languages, to think that there can be a ‘male gender’ or a ‘female gender.’ So a great radical liberation has been lost. We are all back in our (check) boxes.

If you have ever designed a Web form, you will almost certainly have asked your website visitor to give you her or his name. I wrote about that in my previous post on Web form design. Almost as common is asking visitors whether they are male or female—about which I shall be sounding off in my next post on this topic. In this post I want to say a couple of simple things about asking for dates in Web forms.

People who design forms for airline flight bookings aren’t likely to be reading this post. But lots of us design forms for local car hire companies, or local property agents, so that bookings can be made online. And both of these are common on the Costa Blanca.

The first point is really obvious. Don’t expect people to enter dates by hand. Give the website visitor a popup calendar for each date field. In particular, I recommend the jQuery UI date picker. You can style it exactly the way you want, and, in its recent versions, it has all the options any Web designer could ask for.

And now a free goodie. Lots of us want to set a second date picker to start at the date already set by a first date picker. I spent months Googling for a simple way to do this before I came across a solution. And this is my simpler version. (In programming, as in maths, the simpler solutions are the more difficult to work out. And the more useful to other people.)

$( document ).ready( function() {
	$( "#start" ).datepicker({ dateFormat: 'yy-mm-dd', firstDay: 1 });
	$( "#end" ).datepicker({
		dateFormat: 'yy-mm-dd',
		firstDay: 1,	// Monday, for Spanish calendar
		beforeShow: function()	{
			dt = $( "#start" ).datepicker( 'getDate' );
			return { minDate: dt };
				// JSON - dt could be 'null' (which is OK)
		}
	});
});

This relies on your knowing some jQuery, of course. But you’ll need that to use the date picker. Date field 1 has an ID of start; date field 2 an ID of end. You won’t need ‘firstDay’ at all if your week begins on Sunday. Check the date picker documentation for the other option fields.

That could be it. But I have one axe to grind. If you have to ask for dates using separate days and months, do not use the provincial American order of month-day-year, especially if you’re asking for numbers.

I sometimes wonder if the effect of their date system on their infant minds is why some Americans have such odd ways of thinking. Year→month→day (as in the MySQL format above) makes sense, going from greater to lesser; so does day→month→year, going the other way. But month→day→year? Month→day→year? It just leaps about the place, without any logic to it. 11/09/2001 is a date to make all of us feel a sense of human solidarity with Americans. It’s the eleventh day of September, 2001. The problem is that Americans write it 09/11/2001, which can only logically refer to the ninth day of November. I suppose it’s a sign of our solidarity that almost all English speakers now refer to the date as “nine-eleven.” But we mustn’t let our solidarity influence us when asking for dates in Web forms.

If you have ever designed a form for the Web, the chances are that your form design will have included a form field (or form fields) to get your Web visitor’s name.

I filled in a Web form like this just this morning. And how did it ask for my name? (Wait for it.) First name and Last name. This is so common it’s appalling. The clear assumption (and this is proved by automated replies, which always start ‘Dear [First name],’—or even ‘Howdy, [First name],’) is that the Web visitor’s first name is their personal name, and that their family name or surname is their last name.

This is to be as bizarrely provincial as you can get. OK, in the USA and in the UK, this is common. But the majority of human beings on this planet put their family name first. I’ll say that again, in case there are any provincial Americans reading this post: the majority of human beings on this planet put their family name first and their personal name last.

At this moment a Chinese woman tennis player is going great guns in Melbourne. Her name sometimes appear as Li Na, and sometimes as Na Li. Commentators still seem to find it difficult to get their head round the name, to work out which is her personal name. I also remember hearing Americans, during the Iraq war, referring to “President Hussein.” This is like saying “President George.” Saddam was the dictator’s family name, so he put it first. Hussein was his personal name, so he put it second.

The consequence for Web form designers? It is vital that we abandon the awful First name/Last name or First name/Surname practice. Web form designers must ask instead for Family name and Personal name. That way our Web forms will be understood (and can be translated) across the planet.