ASP.NET Forum Tags: Semicolons as Separators?

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:

  1. Open the “Select Tags…” dialog.
  2. Select two (short) tags. (I notice lots of other folks thought that a space would be a logical delimiter too…!)
  3. Close the dialog.
  4. Oops. Closing the dialog didn’t populate the text box with my selections. Awesome.
  5. Trying again… Open the “Select Tags…” dialog.
  6. 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.”)
  7. Click OK.
  8. 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. 😉