Our people weigh in on the issues of the day.

Blue Slate's people think a lot about the challenges facing their industries today. In the process, they often come up with completely unexpected slants on current issues, or new ways of thinking about business problems. Bluespeak is where they share those thoughts. Feel free to read and reflect.

[Any views or opinion represented in this blog are personal and belong solely to the blogger and do not represent those of Blue Slate Solutions.]

State Selection Lists on Website Forms - How Hard Are They to Sort?

This post certainly falls into the “nitpick” category, but the flaw occurs often enough to be somewhat irritating.  The problem you ask?  Drop-down lists of state names that are not ordered by the state name but instead by the state’s 2-letter postal abbreviation.  Granted, this error pales in comparison to applications containing SQL injection flaws or race conditions exposing personal information, but I’m going to complain none-the-less.

What exactly is the issue?  Well, it turns out that the two letter postal abbreviations (for example AK for Alaska and HI for Hawaii) can’t be used as the key for sorting the state names into alphabetical order.  For the most part it works, however for some states, such as Nevada through New Mexico it breaks.  As a New York resident I get tripped up by this.

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Thursday June 14, 2012 | By David Read