Today I had to send a schema to the school my kid will join this fall. This was done on the web and it started pretty well, they even mentioned "GNU Linux" and Firefox as supporting platforms.
But when I came to enter a date I entered "2011-08-15" and going to the next field it changed to "20.11.0815". DD.MM.YY or DD.MM.YYYY is the most common date format here in Norway. It may not be as odd as the US one but it's still stupid, annoying and not a standard. Javascript based validation may not be too bad as a first line for data entry but when it's messing up the data it's not so good. And there was no hint at which format they wanted.
So, next page; Address entries. Yet another required field: "Poststed" aka "Postal place" / city. But in front of that field it's the post code and in Norway, the code is national so entering that will tell which place you live.
Icing on the cake: You have to live in Oslo anyway, so the next entry field, required aswell, was which borough we live in and the fifteen in Oslo was listed.
So, entering all this, hitting "receipt by SMS" and a thank you page was accompanied by "BEEP BEEP" from my phone. On that page they tell me that I will hear from the school when they have received the schema.
Which they do by (e)mail.
