Usability failure: Delicious

I have just been trying to register an account at Delicious to test out a report to delicious tag.

Like many entry forms it has a CAPTCHA irritation.

Like many entry forms it requires the CAPTCHA and the password fields to be re-entered if the form is not accepted for any reason - in this case because the username is already taken.

There needs to be a usability law of the form 'Never destroy the user's work'. To do so is gross discourtesy.

This is in part due to a flaw in the forms implementation in the browsers. Even if the Web site is careless with the user's effort, there is no excuse for the browser to throw it away. In time we might fix HTML forms to eliminate this irritation, but for the time being a button that would bring the lost work back would be nice.

Of course support for OpenID would eliminate the need for registration altogether.