[Sigia-l] Column Organization and dot.net environment

[Katie Ware]

Any techie folks out there? Here's my situation. We've got a form page that 
has a section with all fifty states as options. Users can select one or more 
states. Originally the programmer put the states in four columns in alpha 
order left to right. I asked that it be switched to four columns alpha top 
to bottom (the way the wireframes indicated) as it is easier to scan and 
find a desired state that way.

What is happening is - if a user does something to get an error message, 
e.g. doesn't fill in a required field, any states that were checked lose 
their checked status when the page refreshes with the error message.

My tech folks are saying that this wouldn't happen if the columns were alpha 
ordered left to right and it would take a lot of coding to make it retain 
any checks with the alpha top down ordering in the error scenario. And it's 
because they're using dot.net.

This doesn't make sense to me, but I am not a programmer.  Any thoughts? I 
realize I may not have the whole picture...

thanks,
Katie