While trying to buy tickets online for the Ontario Science Centre, I saw this:

Seriously, how hard is it to accept a postal code without a space and add it yourself?

Later on in the transaction, I hit an SSL error because the certificate was valid for “www.ontariosciencecentre.ca” but I happened to type “ontariosciencecentre.ca” into my browser, and none of the links after that redirected me to “www.”. If their certificate relies on the “www.” prefix, then their web server should be redirecting me.

They might know everything there is to know about science (and they do, I’ve loved going to the Science Centre since I was a kid), but their webmaster has a few things to learn.

Update: As you can see in the comments, Ken Huxley from the Science Centre has fixed the postal code problem and is working on fixing the SSL problem as well. Kudos to him, and my apologies for my condescending “has a few things to learn” comment above (not to mention the title of the post). When he mentioned that he was going to reconfigure DNS to fix the SSL problem, I realized that I understand at a high level what he’s going to do, but I have no idea how to actually do it. I guess I have a few things to learn as well. But if I hadn’t whined written about the problems I found, they wouldn’t have gotten fixed, so it’s nice to know that my blog has made the world a better place.