CRA PDF form validation frustrations

While trying to file my Canadian taxes as a nonresident, using the “Income Tax and Benefit Return for Non-residents … of Canada” — since I live in the United States and am a tax resident of the United States — I ran into a really frustrating bug in the first 5 form fields.

The form doesn’t accept non-Canadian provinces/territories and postal codes!

Can't put Massachusetts as a state
MA? not allowed.
Can't input a ZIP code
ZIP code? not allowed.

It’s really foolish, because many of the people who would be filing this form are likely residing outside of Canada. That’s why this version of the T1 return has an added Country field in the address block.

This is the kind of situation when PDF forms should just step back and allow free-form, unvalidated input.

When NOT to use Flash

I’m calling out The Daily Pennsylvanian for worst uses of Flashever. Flash animations make sense when interactivity is demanded, and only then, in rare cases.

A couple of months ago, this happened: a post lauding the university for winning the 2012 CIO 100 Award for mobile-friendly sites, using Flash as the only content on the page:

The irony.
The irony.

To top it off, guess what the mobile site shows on a phone?

Mobile friendly, my ass.
Mobile friendly, my ass.

Yeah, that’s right. A blank article.

I wouldn’t be so mad if it were a one-time thing. But then this illustration of our commencement speakers was published this week:

You can't think of a way to present this well with a table?
You can’t think of a way to present this well with a table?

Again, a blank article shows on mobile. And it’s not just my phone that does this: development of Flash for mobile was halted nearly 2 years ago, and iOS has clearly not had Flash since the start.

But my gripe isn’t with Flash itself, or even with mobile compatibility — I’m just upset that people are using a medium that doesn’t make sense for things that shouldn’t even be interactive. I get it; college kids like to play around with software, or whatever. But you guys gotta stop this.