Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HTML Form Validation is underused

expressionstatement.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 343 posts

Re: HTML Form Validation is underused

#191

Post by ragnese »

onion2k wrote: post #124
francislavoie wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Users are too stupid to fix their own inputs in many cases. Seen inputs with zero-width spaces that are invisible which fail validation. User doesn't understand why, complains. Enforcing a character set for certain kinds of inputs is a very good thing.

In 26 years of web dev, mostly as a frontend person, I've only seen zero width spaces in three situations - pasting from Word - QA testers being through - devs pranking each other The third one is by far the most common. Word is much better these days and I've not seen that happen in a long time. I wish I saw QA test this stuff more often. The idea that it's common enough that you'd break your UX to handle it bafflin…

I'll be one of those guys. I see the invisible whitespace from pasting ALL the time. I've literally dealt with user complaints caused by it three times in the last two weeks! (Usually customer issues don't make it to me unless our support team can't figure it out or suspects a bug)

To be fair, it's not usually that frequent. Just a funny coincidence that I've JUST dealt with it more recently.

Re: HTML Form Validation is underused

#192

Post by HappMacDonald »

francislavoie wrote: post #127
onion2k wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 26 years of web dev, mostly as a frontend person, I've only seen zero width spaces in three situations - pasting from Word - QA testers being through - devs pranking each other The third one is by far the most common. Word is much better these days and I've not seen that happen in a long time. I wish I saw QA test this stuff more often. The idea that it's common enough that you'd break your UX to handle it bafflin…

"Break your UX" is a vast exaggeration. I'm not talking about phone number fields, to be clear. I'm talking about like numeric amounts, with maybe a negative or decimal point. It's literally just [0-9\.-] but that still requires JS to limit inputs to that.

What's wrong with

though?

Re: HTML Form Validation is underused

#193

Post by mrweasel »

temporallobe wrote: post #76

There’s a reason it’s heavily underused. So many frameworks and libraries provide robust, style-able validation capabilities, some with very sophisticated and extendable functionality. Don’t torture yourself if you don’t have to.

You also have to implement your own validation on the backend anyway. There's always going to be someone trying to fiddle around with your form, either using some weird browser, curl, or some other tool that doesn't have the same form validation built in. You're not going to trust that the client actually did the validation, or did it correctly, so the backend still needs to be able to validate input and show the form, with validation errors, on all fields.

Frontend validation is only there to be helpful for the user, but if you can style it, or trigger it from the backend on submit, you have to implement your own styling anyway.

Re: HTML Form Validation is underused

#194

Post by n_plus_1_acc »

francislavoie wrote: post #131
lozenge wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a way to annotate it. autocomplete=one-time-code https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...

True, but vast majority of websites don't do the right thing. So password managers need to manage a database of form input overrides. I worked at a small company building a password manager and it was a bit of a nightmare, we had to allocate support staff resources to handling reports of website incompatibilities.

I'm curious, why did you implement your own password manager?

Re: HTML Form Validation is underused

#195

Post by mrweasel »

bugtodiffer wrote: post #137
DeathArrow wrote: post #132

>Imagine a username input that should be valid only if the username is not taken Maybe that is user friendly but for sure I don't like to see the backend bombarded with API calls each time an user types a letter.

WebSockets, then it's a couple bytes a click

I don't think the amount of traffic is necessarily the issue. You're validation could be fairly "expensive". Maybe you need to do a lookup in a legacy system, maybe you need to check multiple systems?

You'd probably have to wait until the user moves on to the next field, if there's more, but that's also a little silly, as you'd force the user to go back to a previous field.

Re: HTML Form Validation is underused

#196

Post by mrweasel »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #25
mannyv wrote: post #24

The real problem with client-side validation is you can't trust it. You need to revalidate on the server, no matter what.

It's not a security feature, it's a UX feature.

It's a UX feature, absolutely, but you can't trigger the browsers validators from the backend, so you'd need to implement your own styling anyway, probably even add a bit more information than the browser can natively handle.

Re: HTML Form Validation is underused

#197

Post by francislavoie »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #192
francislavoie wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Break your UX" is a vast exaggeration. I'm not talking about phone number fields, to be clear. I'm talking about like numeric amounts, with maybe a negative or decimal point. It's literally just [0-9\.-] but that still requires JS to limit inputs to that.

What's wrong with though?

It doesn't prevent the bad input, it only validates it on submission. Therefore it's on the user to fix it, and if it's from a zero-width space, it's literally invisible. Non-technical users will have no idea what to look for to fix it (i.e. use your arrow keys cursor to see at which character the arrow key doesn't shift visually, and there's the ZWSP). It happens way too often.

Re: HTML Form Validation is underused

#198

Post by ximm »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #40

Last time I checked, web-browsers today still do not allow you to style the appearance of built-in HTML validation messages [1]; this wouldn't be so bad if Chrome (and Firefox) still conformed to their OS platform UI guidelines (i.e. so it looks system-generated, like how `title=""` tooltips used to be), instead Chrome uses this ugly yellow/orange icon color with black-text on a white background on a bubble with a fi…

I never really understood why people want to style stuff like this. I like how you can express yourself by using colors and layout and stuff like that. But at some point usability is more important than branding.

Re: HTML Form Validation is underused

#199

Post by francislavoie »

hluska wrote: post #177
francislavoie wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Users are too stupid to fix their own inputs in many cases. Seen inputs with zero-width spaces that are invisible which fail validation. User doesn't understand why, complains. Enforcing a character set for certain kinds of inputs is a very good thing.

I’ve read some very user hostile things in my career, but this one is particularly acerbic. It’s a bad look. If I ever grew to hate users this much, I would find a new career. You should consider that.

I'm not being user hostile. I'm being cognizant that the skill levels of users is extremely wide, and to best serve everyone from a UX standpoint, it's best to limit the characters accepted in the input. It protects the user, helps them avoid mistakes.

Re: HTML Form Validation is underused

#200

Post by pglevy »

jansommer wrote: post #66

Html form validation is great. There's just one gigantic catch: It doesn't work in Firefox for Android. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1510450

I just realized this having switched to FF on Android fairly recently. Working on an app and saw literally nothing when trying to submit an empty required field. Couldn't imagine what I was missing until I searched. I was stunned. No issue with rolling your own validation but this should work!
Post reply on HN