Many web applications insist that inputted data follow a precisely prescribed, often unintuitive, form: Phone numbers have to use an exact layout ("Do not enter parenthesis or dashes in phone number!"), or postal codes can't have spaces ("Enter postal code as A#A#A#! Do not enter a space!").

While sometimes these rules conform to common norms, many times they're completely inexcusable, arbitrary choices on the part of a very-lazy programmer or GUI developer.

I've come across this countless times, but it came to the forefront while I looked at "competitors" to the trivial yaflaColor (which is a micro-utility to solve my own need to easily and quickly get colour scales for theming). One such alternative included a box where you could punch in the hex color, and out would pop a color theme. Aside the hex color box, and as a pop-up, was the warning "DO NOT ENTER THE #!" (as web colours are usually prefaced with a #, they clearly knew that many users would input this form).

Really - What takes longer: Writing a single line of code to parse out the #, or forcing every single user to read and understand that warning, and possible alter what they were going to put in there (e.g. if they were just going to paste in web colors it would be a no go - now they have to edit each of them)? Why in the world would someone choose the route of refusing such a ridiculously trivial allowance?

Yet sadly this is entirely too common: Too many times I've been forced to remove (or add) spaces in inputs that have zero possible impact on the preciseness or ambiguity of the input.

To save the developer a tiny amount of time, countless users are forced to waste their time.