Comments on: Impress your Web Visitors with real-time Form Validation

By: Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:20:05 +0000

For those of you subscribed to this post, I found a neat library online for form validation called LiveValidation.

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:19:29 +0000

Not so fast Doug - I agree with your original premise that these helpful features, such as formatting a SSN on the fly are trivial. And its lazy to just post a message that its wrong, when you can fix it without having to guess at the format.

However, I also agree with Nicolas about using Server Side logic in conjunction with AJAX.

By: Bob

Bob — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:32:57 +0000

Yea, I came here hoping for some example code. Please rename the topic of this posting.

By: Nancy

Nancy — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 02:09:43 +0000

I agree with you. Some forms look fine, but it doesn’t offer good validation. Personal information are given and it’s only proper to take it seriously just like any business forms in hard copy.

By: Rhonda Starke

Rhonda Starke — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:10:58 +0000

I agree that client validation can be a very user friendly feature. However, it is more important to make sure that the validations themselves actually make sense.

You provided a brilliant example of how validation can mislead users and, worse, drive them away from our site:

Geek Wisdom’s password strength validation from considers tZhKwnUmIss to be a weak password. Not only is this a perfectly strong password but it will also alienate users because it gives them the false impression that logging into your site using this password will be somehow insecure.

It would be much better (and easier) to simply hint users that a good password is at least six characters long and should contain both numbers and letters.

Other questionable validations include user names that need a certain minimum length or may not contain spaces. What’s wrong with the usernames X, john doe, or even #*!§? I can handle that.