"Some years ago I was looking for a job and did a lot of online résumé form filling," Gustavo S. writes.
"One of those many sites had a form that took about a second to uppercase my name when I hit Tab, before putting the focus on the next field.
"That puzzled me. One second to uppercase a single-lined string?! I kept filling the other fields and it continued like this... until it got worse. When I got to the multiline, free text fields to describe past experiences and so forth, I could go for a coffee after every field.
"That was too much for me and I (too late already) looked at the page source.
"The javascript was something like this:
function validate(field) { var A = " abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890,.:!?@#$%¨&*()_+=[]^`Çç{}`^<>\\/|"; var B = " ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890,.:_____________________________"; var oldval = field.value; var newval = ""; for (var i=0; i<oldval.length; i++) { var char = A.indexOf(oldval.substr(i, 1)); newval = newval + B.substr(char, 1); } field.value = newval; }
"Somehow I felt glad that they didn't call me."