[whatwg] [WebForms2] custom form validation notifications

[Henri Sivonen]

On Oct 9, 2006, at 01:32, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

> As UAs become more sophisticated, they can analyze the pattern  
> attribute and present more context-sensitive error messages than  
> any such attribute could. For example:
> *   "410 is too much; this number must be 300 or less."
> *   "178 is too small; this number must be 200 or more."
> *   "This field must start with a letter."
>
> UAs can also localize these error messages much more extensively  
> than any Web site could (which will be even more of a benefit when  
> the Web site is not in your preferred language).

No offense intended, but "As UAs become more sophisticated, they can  
analyze——" generally indicates a problem.

I believe that the above can work for min and max. However, expecting  
user-friendly natural language descriptions of regular expressions  
(in multiple natural languages!) to emerge "as UAs become more  
sophisticated" is in the realm of expecting future AI-complete magic  
software to fix things. In general, that's not a good assumption to  
make.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/