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Form expectations

12 Jun 2003

It’s been said many times before, but developers still don’t seem to understand. If you have requirements for the contents of your forms, tell people up front. Don’t make them submit the form in order to find out that you need phone numbers formatted in a certain way or want a particular length for usernames and passwords.

Filling out an affiliate account application on eSellerate, I entered akalsey for my username and submitted the form. At that point I got a message telling me that my username needed to be at least 8 characters. Besides the fact that they didn’t tell me up front that my username should have been eight characters long, the size limitation is stupid and arbitrary. Why do they have a minimum length for my user name? They don’t have a minimum length for my address.

Anders Jacobsen
June 13, 2003 9:00 AM

Completely agreed. Furthermore, many websites have arbitrary interpretations of what constitutes a valid email address, something that there ARE standards for!

(More info: http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2002/08/24/emailaddresseswithaare_valid.html)


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