Hello everyone,
first post on the list, I’ll be introducing myself at the bottom of
this message.
On 17 Nov 2005, at 11:51, Christopher Lenz wrote:
While there are definitely many types of validations that can't be
performed on the client side, calling back to the server just to
check whether e.g. a text-input is empty is overkill IMO. The same
goes for validity checks for common things like text fields
expecting an email address or date.
I'd prefer a hybrid approach, where simple javascript validation
checks are generated, and the others are performed via AJAX callbacks.
I don’t agree with this approach. While I think client-side
validation is fine and dandy, and from a user perspective is
definitely the way to go, we cannot rely on it.
It’s not like we’re in 1999 when we could develop a “DHTML”-
cool-whiz-bang inaccessible piece of crap and still expect to get
along with it. We’re in 2005, and we *know* that some people turn JS
off on purpose, use browsers where JS support sucks, or are disabled
and we cannot feed them some of the “dynamic” stuff we think is so
cool, because they just won’t be able to use it.
We also don’t want to have to mantain the same code in two places:
email-validation in JS on the client and email-validation on the
server (yes, I’m oversimplifying, but you get the idea).
So I think the best way for Django, “the web framework for
perfectionists with deadlines” is to do The Right Thing™ and have
some sort of support for dynamic, JS-based form validation on the
client powered by the same logic that powers the server-side, and
this is where JS libraries and “AJAX” interactions fit in, IMHO.
Bottom line: JS/AJAX stuff, yes but only if it’s done right, which
means accessible and done in a context of progressive enhancement.
What do you guys think?
--
Antonio
About me: I’ve been hacking with Django for some weeks now, I’ve
been developing websites for almost 8 years now and I used to code in
PHP/JS/ActionScript/XSLT. I’ve been moving to Python for the last
year and a half and Django was a godsend in that regard. My first and
only contribution to the project so far has been this rather outdated
guide to get Django on OS X:
http://cavedoni.com/2005/django-osx
I had also planned to contribute the code to produce Atom feeds from
the syndication framework, but somebody beat me to it by a couple of
days (damn!).
