gary lawrence murphy wrote although it s like a total shock to NUMBER NUMBER NUMBERnines of all the employed website designers out there the truth is webforms can accept u s of a as a country incredible but true web forms can also accept multiple or even free form telephone numbers and can even be partitioned into manageable steps all this can also be done without selling exclusive rights to your wallet to the world s second richest corporation assuming cisco is still NUMBER and vendor locking your business into their small transaction fee tithe ah but you ve just gotten to the crux of the situation there s good design and bad design there s good testing and bad testing the problem is anyone can design a good web form but nobody does i think best practices hasn t caught up on main street web enablement yet there s some really great packages on how to do this stuff and in fact the usability people knew that web forms needed to be fixed NUMBER years ago so that s why we got xforms and xhtml you can shoot yourself in the foot and people usually do what the problem is they don t even recognize that they re gimpy ever they just keeping trundling along making a mess of everything assured in their job security that they can build web forms without even caring if they can be used or not beyond their test machine if you had a piece of software and a security warning came out NUMBER years ago on it would you run that software wouldn t you have patched or upgraded something so fundamentally broken NUMBER years and NUMBER months ago what i want to know is why would someone use web forms best practices from NUMBER years ago i mean you can get a college degree in that time imagine if the next version of microsoft windows or red hat linux forced you to use a tiled window manager sure tiled windows were the best we had for a brief period of time but they are completely useless except for some terminal based replacement applications the bottom line is if you can t get across the bridge then it s broken regardless of whose fault it really is and it s the business that needs to take responsibility as they are the ones that wanted to put the bridge there in the first place greg 