Re: 508 Form fields question

> cognitive perspective, might it be more useful to have a character count of
> how many characters have been typed, with an appropriate message, rather

Typically the engineering limit is on the number of bytes, not the
number of characters.  Explicit UTF-8 and the typical browser recovery
(that many BBS type systems now rely upon) of sending numeric entities
for unencodeable characters, means that it may be necessary to change
the number by more than one.  I'd suggest that it is slightly more acceptable
to have discontinuities in the remaining character count than to report an
engineering bytes used figure and pretend it was then number of characters
typed.

Really, the best solution is to use data structures that are not restricted
in capacity.

If one doesn't want problems from variable length codes, you will have to
explicitly validate each character for being in the allowed character set.

Systems that impose limits can impose their own fragilities, e.g. one I have
used gets confused and keeps objecting if one tries to correct an overflow
by deleting characters in the middle of the textarea.

Received on Monday, 5 January 2004 02:39:45 UTC