yup. they probably should. The problem is, then you have users who don't put in the dashes at all and uses spaces, users who grab the number from another application, pulling in bad characters in propreitary code, etc. The coder then decides to make it so there is NO opportunity at all to place dashes, spaces, dots, let alone fucked up proprietary characters.
A few months ago, we chased one of these proprietary characters bugs around. discover one, strip it. Discover another, strip it. It was quite entertaining. It was a homegrown blogging app built five years ago, and the range of people who use it mean that we have writers all over the world using all kinds of word processing apps to write the article, then paste it into the blogging tool.
At this point, if I argue with a coder that they can just go the extra mile and try to guess about whatever a luser is going to do, they throw up their hands and say, "Fuck lusers!" You can't blame them on one hand. If we were to ask our writers to plop their text in notepad, THEN copy /paste, they'd scream bloody murder about how haaaaaaaaaaard it is to do that. or, they'd get pissed because they don't understand this bullshit about proprietary characters, convincing themselves that we are all sitting around playing wii and ping pong, looking for any opportunity to avoid work.
Without someone there to act as, what they like to call, "the user advocate" coding will proceed apace, often with an antipathy to the user. You can say this is bullshit, and demand better behavior. but it's not getting at the root of the problem. This isn't because they are assholes; rather, it's about the division of labor and alienation in the process which divorces the workers from the world of the people who actually use their products. It's the same reason why a fastfood worker might drop food on the floor, pick it up and reassemble your sandwich.
the solution, increasingly, is to hire these "user advocates" but, in the end, it's a bandaid. After all, creating a specialized role is just further fragmenting the very division of labor that caused the alienation in the first place.
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