A smarter month and year input field: solving the credit card expiry conundrum

Every computer-savvy keyboarder has run into this problem before: you’re typing your merry way through a credit card payment form, pounding out your address and credit card numbers, tabbing between the fields so you don’t waste time mucking around with the mouse, when you come across the dreaded expiry date fields:

Expiry Date Fields

You groan. You know what’s coming next. Your card expires in April of 2019. Are they expecting you to type ‘A’ for “April” or to key in “04”? Or maybe it’s just ‘4’? Murphy’s law guarantees that whatever sequence you try typing these options in, it’ll be the last one you try. You sigh. You either try the different options haphazardly, holding your breath and cringing when it doesn’t change, or changes to select the wrong value. Finally, you give up and move your hand those excruciatingly-far 6″ to the mouse, and sigh in despair as you resort to clicking on the drop-down box and scrolling through the entries to select the one you’re looking for.

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JavaScript “Protection:” Don't Fall for it!

Every once in a while it comes up again. JavaScript – used totally wrong. This times it’s Hivelogic’s “Enkoder” script reborn for Wordpress. What people just don’t get is: JavaScript was never meant to be used as a heavy cavalry, a knight in shining armor, or else a bit of code that can may be used to do anything – because it’s not.

JavaScript can do a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean it should be used that way. But that’s not the problem – not this time. The problem is that people are still insisting on believing that using JavaScript to hide text means that the bad guys won’t ever see it. But that’s just not true.

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