> User - Developer - Component Developer.
> 1. Users insert and own the data
> 2. Developers may or may not know apriori data format

Perhaps my self-taught background to development has led me astray. I
always believed that it was the developers responsibility to find out
the data requirements in order to build a database and application
that fits the client requirements. (Of course, if you are building
for military applications perhaps you are not allowed to know :-).

Yes the users insert and own the data. However it is the developer
which (I thought) was supposed to have studied the requirements and
should know (better than your average user) in detail what is and is
not permitted.

> I can live with whichever option Jason selects, and have tried to
> counter the trimming option for a basic principle.

I dont think our principles are different, just the priority in which
we place them.

I agree that there are occassional fields where I dont want the
component to play with the field contents, but in my work these have
been very rare. As I said in a previous email, I almost consider it
my business to mess with the users data. That is what the client
wants. They want their data forced into a reliable and consistent
format so that searches and processing can be depended upon to produce
reliable and consistent results.

As a result I raise the priority of making development faster by
having the components default to what I want most, taking special
action only where it is necessary.


It is always a mistake to draw to great a generalisation purely from
your experience. And quite possibly this is what I am doing. I have
no experience in communications, scientific or military applications,
and I have no idea how big a proportion of development projects
involve such applications.


Its amazing how such a simple aspect can generate so much interest and
varied discussion.

Geoff Worboys
Telesis Computing