Posted by Vicente Werner on 05/10/05 22:19

On 5/10/05, Marcus Bointon <marcus@synchromedia.co.uk> wrote:
> From a customer point of view, client side validation is very much
> in line with creating a trouble-free system.
Don't think so, javascript is the gate to all problems, until they put
a really stable javascript implementation, javascript is nothing but
trouble: Take for example qforms, probably the most robust dhtml
validation system I know of (better than formcat, formsess, etc..),
still has a significant amount of browsers where it dosn't work as it
should, and even on those that looks like works flawlessly there're
some situations that ruin it.

> I'm not even going to begin to suggest that it attempts to work in
> all browsers. Even in these enlightened Firefox times, IE6 still
> counts for ~90% of traffic. If I had client-side validation that ONLY
> ran in IE6, it would serve the vast majority of clients well, with no
> impact on javascript compatibility elsewhere. Everyone else can fall
> back to server-side validation. Further compatibility can wait.
Call me lazy, but certainly I don't see the benefits outweighting the
effort just to make it run, you still have to duplicate work and it's
not worth it.

> I disagree - they insist that you do duplicate your work if you want
> both client and server side validation.
No, they just don't think it's the way to do things (why have two
systems, with double probability of failure?, use one)
> That's not hard - if a smarty plugin can generate appropriate
> template content and messages for validation on the server side, then
> it can also generate Javascript to do the same thing on the client
> side. Put it like this - SmartyValidate is a set of Smarty plugins to
> add server-side validation.
I know it's not impossible, but you're adding extra work.. and extra
code that might break up: don't code more than necessary if you want
to keep your system as trouble free as possible.

> I hadn't got as far as integration with form generation, but that
> would be the next logical step.
Qforms although it has some form generation capabilities is mostly a
GOOD validation tool.

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