Haacked.com has posted another great article. The basic jist is don’t force your users to input the data as you want but manipulate the data to the way you want it giving your users a much nicer experience. It also has a nice Seinfeld Soup Nazi reference.
Be reasonable; are we so afraid of regular expressions that we can’t strip extraneous characters from a single input field? Let the users type their telephone numbers in whatever they please. We can use a little quick programming to filter out what we don’t need.
User: (filling out form) user+nospam@example.com
Validation Nazi: Entering a plus sign is $2.00 extra.
User: But the RFC allows for a plus sign.
Soup Nazi: You want plus sign?
User: Yes please.
Validation Nazi: $3.00!
User: What?
Validation Nazi: No form submission for you!
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