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zach — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:03:43 +0000

i’ve been working on some forms for a couple of different clients, and it never ceases to amaze me how much extra time i end up spending on them. i think i finally have my favorite system of validating w/both javascript and php. but i’m sure that will change. one of the clients was easier to do in some ways because they only deal with local clients. the other is international, so i had to think about country codes in phone numbers and find a list of every country. in some ways that was easier, though, because validation goes out the window; there are different phone number lengths, some countries don’t have zip codes, and with a chance of javascript being disabled, there’s no pretty way of listing different states in different countries. i’m feeling like someday, since we all deal with forms, form validation/entry will be taken care of by the browser, and the code will just tell the browser what info is wanted (‘address’ instead of ‘street address’, ‘state’, ‘zip’, etc.). api’s and cms’ are okay for some things, but for a quick and dirty form, it would be nice to have smarter browsers. what a pipe dream though. or maybe a pipe nightmare; i can just imagine having to hack the heck out of css to have the browser ‘form’ not explode a site.

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