Re: Filtering Default Text in Forms

under score (_) is fine.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Matthew Smith" <matt@kbc.net.au>
To: "WAI Interest Group" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 04, 2004 8:22 PM
Subject: Filtering Default Text in Forms



Hi All

I have never been a great fan of having "place marking" text in form fields
due
to the large number of users who put their input after this text, rather
than
replacing it (approximately one in four on some feedback forms I have seen).

Removing the default text during form processing using a regular expression
is a
possibility, but there is always the chance that the default text may need
to
occur in the input.

One possible solution that I can see is to have default text forming a
pattern
that would not be used as input.  For example:
"search for these words" may be valid input whereas
"search_for_these_words", separated using underscores, would be far safer.

It would then be a simple matter to filter the pattern out (Perl example):
$search_words=~s/search_for_these_words//g;

I can, however, see a problem here.  How would an audio device render my
underscores?  Is there a "safe" character that I can use to replace the
space
for this technique?

Cheers

M

-- 
Matthew Smith
Kadina Business Consultancy
South Australia

Received on Sunday, 4 July 2004 20:52:46 UTC