Keith Devens .com

Best practices for web form errors

Simplified Form Errors

Anything else anyone can recommend? I reworked my form library a bit, which I plan to release as open source. One of the things it can do is generate a default form given a form definition. Most of the time, that form is completely adequate and you don't need to do anything else. The form I'm typing in right now is completely auto-generated.

Anyway, I just want to make sure I make the generated forms as good as possible, so if anyone has anything else they'd like to point me to, please do.

Update: A little more here

Also, what about security? You can prevent automated posting to some degree by, for example, marking the form with the timestamp it was sent as well as an associated hash of that timestamp. When both are sent to the server they're validated against each other. It doesn't completely prevent automated posting, but it would at least require some HTML scraping to circumvent. What else?

Update: It seems to me that there are a few kinds of errors you have to report. You have the field-specific errors, such as "E-mail address is required", and "E-mail address was not in a valid format", and then inter-field errors, such as "Both password fields didn't match". Then you have whole-form errors that summarize the state of the entire form, such as "There was an error posting your entry".

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05:29 (utc-4)
edited: 14:10 (utc-4)