Ummm… OK I know Microsoft is trying to give the illusion of being user friendly and all, but when the delimiter for tags that categorize a post on the ASP.NET developer forums, they chose semicolons.
Is it just me or is that a ludicrous choice? Why not a space (my preference – a la delicious) or a comma?
In addition, there is no example visible to show you what the legal delimiter is! You have to miraculously divine what it wants, or let it show you what it wants, as I chose to do.
To find out what the delimiter is, I had to do the following:
- Open the “Select Tags…” dialog.
- Select two (short) tags. (I notice lots of other folks thought that a space would be a logical delimiter too…!)
- Close the dialog.
- Oops. Closing the dialog didn’t populate the text box with my selections. Awesome.
- Trying again… Open the “Select Tags…” dialog.
- Select two (short) tags, this time at the end of the list where I notice OK and Cancel buttons (yes – you heard that right. The buttons are embedded in the list itself… and at the bottom of the list, no less! They’re not on the dialog “window.”)
- Click OK.
- Observe that text box has the new selections delimited by semicolons.
The auto-populating text box is another usability nightmare deserving of its own article, but I’ll let someone else write that one up. ;)
