I was shopping online yesterday and when it came time to enter my credit card number, the form had a stern warning - "No Spaces".

I have used many different forms online and many of them have these sort of limitation: credit card numbers, phone numbers, zip codes are the most frequently occurring.

So basically, the web site developers are putting the onus on to the customer, instead of on to the server's computers. How hard is it to remove spaces from a credit card number? Or to understand that not all countries have 5 digit zip codes?

Why do programmers ask people to do jobs that are better done by computers?
And why do they ask people questions that a computer program can find out for itself?

Lucky Australia :-)

I read a Smarthouse article complaining about this and about Microsoft's attitude to Australia in general.

On page 2 of the article, he quotes an ex-Microsoft executive saying "All their marketing is geared to the enterprise and small business markets". There is nothing wrong with that as an overall strategy, but as usual, Microsoft does everything in the way most designed to irritate it's customers.

Firstly, the world is now a small place. Here in Australia, we can read every detail about every new product whether it is made in Sydney, Cupertino, Redmond or Darkest Peru. To announce a new product with great fanfare and then to say that you are only going to release it in certain markets just doesn't work.

Microsoft already has the retailers in place selling it's existing products, so there is no infra-structure to set up, no deals to negotiate with phone carries or book publishers - just ship the thing.

The second thing is that if Microsoft really wants to concentrate on the enterprise and small business market, then they should stop futzing around trying to copy other companies' products and they produce something for that market. There is no need for them to spend billions trying to compete with the Sony Playstation, the iPod, the iPhone and now the iPod Touch. None of those products (with the possible exception of the iPhone) are geared to the enterprise or business markets, so why does Microsoft bother.

I am sure they have some very clever and innovative people working at Microsoft, but I don't think they get much of a voice. Basing new products on what the competitors produced a year before, is bound to fail in the long term.

I just don't get Apple TV. For starters, it's not a TV. It doesn't even have a TV receiver. So you plug it into your existing TV and stream YouTube videos? Or watch all the TV shows & movies that you buy/rent from iTunes.

Maybe this works in the USA, but in Australia, where we have internet plans that give you a limited number of GBs per month, downloading entire movies or TV episodes is not going to work.

Usually, Apple products are multi-function. For example, my iPhone replaces my phone, my diary, my camera, my address book and even the paperback that I used to carry around. Apple TV just adds to the TV, DVD player, set-top box and without really adding any functionality that I value.

My 24" iMac has a screen that is vastly better than the TV we have anyway, so I can see no purpose for an Apple TV in it's current form.

So what changes would make me consider buying one:
- TV receiver (digital & analog)
- DVD player (preferably without region encoding)
- BluRay player
- the ability to schedule recording of TV shows to the hard drive

W3C has announced that it is no longer developing HTML 4 & XHTML 1.0 but is moving to HTML 5.

There are plenty of web sites discussing this and providing HTML 5 tutorials, and I have only skimmed through them, but I reckon this is a great idea. It seems that HTML is now going to recognise the way web pages are structured and provide easier ways to do that. If the standards are used correctly, it should make web page design and creation a much less tedious job and so designers will again be free to concentrate on the content and not on the technology needed to display it.

One of the best features is the ability to specify form elements as containing dates, times, web addresses, email addresses and so on. Data entry and validation will become so much easier.

Now all we need to do is wait for the browsers to catch up so they can display HTML 5 properly. At the moment, Opera is the best browser for displaying HTML 5, with Safari the next best. I have read that Safari on the iPhone is better than on the desktop, but I haven't tested that and it seems a bit unlikely.

I haven't created any HTML 5 pages yet, but I intend to do some testing and will post links here for anyone who want s to see them.

So is Apple going to produce a tablet computer in the near future?
As usual, there are plenty of rumours and analysts are falling over themselves trying to show that Apple will/will not produce such a computer.

One thing I an quite sure of - Apple will not just produce a Mac equivalent of the existing Windows-based tablets.

Apple is not in the business of producing catch-up products - they look ahead at products that people would buy if those products existed, so any Mac tablet will be different to other tablets.

With the iPhone, Apple has shown that they can take an established market and turn it upside down by doing things in a completely different way. Can they do the same for the tablet market?

One consideration is to see whether there really IS a market for tablets. Will Apple be aiming for that, or for the net-book market, or will they be trying to establish a new niche?

I reckon that the current popularity of net-books will not last. They are cheap and they are easy to carry around, but there are too many people buying them without understanding the limitations imposed by these benefits. Apparently net-books have an extremely high return rate for this reason.

Then there is the tablet market. While there are tablet PCs around, the concept has never really caught on in any major way. Does this mean there isn't a market, or does it mean that no manufacturer has produced a tablet that really suits day-to-day operation?

It will be fascinating to see what emerges and what market it is aimed at. My bet is that Apple will want to use the iPhone technology in a larger computer, so that they will be producing something along the lines of a net-book-sized iPhone.