Re: Email type

Validation schemes coming from specifications such as RFCs might be
correct, but they are not very useful to end users.

It is true that some web sites/web apps reject email address which are
definitely valid in practice (I remember the rejection of the "+" character
in emails such as `erik+test@example.org` by some sites).

But, witness Steven's example: it is technically true that `steven@cwi` is
correct, yet there are virtually zero users in practice for whom that kind
of email address will not be an actual error.

So there is some tension here which is hard to solve: you don't want to
block users, but you also want validation to catch likely errors.

A possible way around this could be to have two kinds of email validations:

1. per RFC, which would catch a wide net and accept `steven@cwi` and other
rare-in-practice addresses
2. practical, which would reject `steven@cwi` and other funny cases

This would work better if XForms had a concept of "warning" validation
(which our implementation supports): you could have a hard validation
catching certainly incorrect addresses and soft/warning validation for the
narrower validation. This would allow a determined user to enter a likely
incorrect email address if she is sure that it is correct, after accepting
the warning. A form author could choose how to deal with the various
options of email validation.

-Erik

On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 12:51 PM, Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 2017-06-23 at 13:28 +0200, Steven Pemberton wrote:
> > Our definition of email accepts the following as a valid email
> > address:
> >
> >       steven@cwi
> >
> > Are we OK with that? I'd expect at least one "." after the @.
>
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-2.3.11
> has:
> [[
> A domain name (or often just a "domain") consists of one or more
>    components, separated by dots if more than one appears.
> ]]
>
> so steven@cwi should be allowed.
>
> Liam
>
>
> --
> Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org>
> The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
>
> Web slave for www.fromoldbooks.org
>
>