Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 10/19/79 11:35

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

>> Download a copy of your HTML document, edit the select element, and use
>> the modified document to submit data that crashes your form handler
>
> This user could not do the same with a non-drop-down input method?

Of course. The drop-down method just creates a common illusion among authors
that it guarantees something, so that no check of input data is needed.

> But when a variant is rejected, the user should clearly be told why, or
> they will get frustrated.

You can make it as clear as you like. I would say that saying "Your input
'...' was not recognized as a country name. Please select a country name or
two-letter country code from the list at ..." would be enough.

> My frustration (as a user) with such lists is when they are used for
> something like time and date (which is much easier to type than to
> select six items from six drop down lists), and when the lists are
> "almost big enough" (such as a "time" list that shows ten elements when
> there are twelve hours and makes you scroll for the rest.)

They are indeed common examples of poor use of drop-down lists. But a very
long list of countries belongs to that set, not the relatively small set of
good uses of drop-down lists in HTML documents.

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

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