From over two years ago:
Originally Posted by
ftnoob
Request for SWAVictor's group: if there is no compelling reason for the variability, please use consistent naming for fields that contain identical data. The registration form for this promotion uses rr_number for the account number. The recent "Chase exclusive offer" uses RR_Number (could be treated differently depending on browser handling of case sensitivity). Standard southwest.com forms already use entered_account_number and RRNUMBER. Apart from inconveniencing the customer (causing form auto-complete not to work), I can't think of any reason why this single bit of data should require four different names.
It was annoying when the right column log-in feature was added to the web site and it didn't seem to remember any of my logins on any of my computers. Then we had the RR 2.0 transition and once again, this time on the revamped login page, form auto-complete failed on all my computers. So I'm thinking,
how many different names for one data field are we up to now, and when will it end? For those of us that manage a half dozen, dozen, or more accounts, this is a lot of wasted time "teaching" multiple computers, each perhaps with multiple browsers, to remember our login.
And to compound matters, the right-column login form never seemed to learn a single account number.
Over the weekend I discovered something odd: the right column account number field suddenly had a whole bunch of IDs available for auto-complete!
After a moment I remembered that I had disabled JavaScript to test a thing or two. When I enabled it again and refreshed the page, the form went back to zero remembered IDs!
After a bit of analysis I determined the cause of the problem is the "Watermark" jQuery plugin that SWA is using. ("Watermark" in this case refers to the technique of putting the field label inside the text field instead of above, below, or next to the field. This is necessary in the revamped web site because so many pages have such extreme amounts of (often useless) content that there is no room for normal field labels.) This particular jQuery plugin apparently doesn't even offer the option to leave autocomplete enabled when watermarking a form.
(I've seen at least one jQuery watermark plugin that lets the programmer choose whether or not to disable autocomplete; which is not to say that is a good or better plugin, just one thing to consider.)
We could create pages and pages of annoyances like this. Many would add to the evidence suggesting that the designers and/or programmers of the web site seem to have never actually
used southwest.com (or any other travel web site).