Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 01/19/93 11:35

Jose <teacherjh@aol.nojunk.com> wrote:

> What could a not-nice user do to a drop-down list?

Download a copy of your HTML document, edit the select element, and use the
modified document to submit data that crashes your form handler, if it is not
prepared to literally anything. The user could be a cracker, or even just a
naive user who tries to create a "customized" form.

> A drop down list is also one way of enforcing spelling.

It moves the problem to variation in country names to the user.

> How would you
> otherwise deal with creative spelers?

Your form handler can accept whatever you wish to make it accept. This could
be just country names in a fixed list, if you like. Actually most people
probably know how to spell the name of their country.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

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