Argh! I’ve just had to type my credit card number into yet another site which won’t let me include spaces between the groups of digits. To make matters worse, there was no indication that spaces weren’t allowed, and the site then completely cleared the field and made me type the whole thing in again.

I program web applications for a living. I know exactly how hard it is to strip the spaces out after the number has been entered – it’s not very hard at all. It takes just one line of code.

So I implore websites everywhere to add that one line. The credit card people emboss the number onto the card with spaces in it because humans are more adept at dealing with isolated groups of four numbers than with a long string of sixteen. So treat your customers like humans and let them enter the spaces as well. After all, it’s only one line of code to get rid of them.