I know I didn’t have much time to coin some new blog posts, since I’m kind of hammered on work. But I thought of releasing a nice little plugin for jQuery that I created for a project. Maybe some of you would benefit from it, although it’s pretty easy to write.
You can get it here – it’s free and open source.
Demo here. Hope you find it useful.
What is validation?
Well, that’s easy: it’s the verification of certain constraints that have to be met when (in a web application’s case) a form is about to be submitted. It’s the first step in the form submission process.
Why do we need it?
Because our application’s users don’t bother reading explications and other text that’s not helping them solve their problem. They usually want to do everything as quick as possible and sometimes don’t fill in their name or email address (or other things that we might need from them). So we have to make our app foolproof by validating the user’s input and suggest that they have to give us the required info.
But I’m checking it using JavaScript…
Sure, JavaScript validation is mandatory in a web form – the user shouldn’t wait until the form gets sent to the server and back (especially on low-bandwidth connections) just to find out that they didn’t write the captcha code correctly.
But what about those users who have JavaScript disabled (approx. 5% as told by w3schools)? Or the spider bots that don’t interpret or don’t care about JavaScript? The can just submit the form bypassing your JavaScript validation. Or the text-based browsers? Or some mobile phone browsers? You get the idea.
Bottom line
Everyone needs server-side validation in their web app. It actually comes first in the development process, even if the user *needs* the JavaScript-based one first.
Something has to be done about the means of accessing the whole web’s content. I’m talking of course about the way we *see* websites.
One of my partners recently brought up the discussion of whether we should support Internet Explorer 6 for a project we were working on. IE6 doesn’t clearly offer what is needed in this day and age to properly view a website. I’m not going to go into the whole anti-IE propaganda, because it makes no sense. But, according to w3schools’ browser stats, IE6 still has 10.9% of the market. That’s quite a lot for a 8 year-old browser that wasn’t respecting the standards back then, so no luck hitting that point now.
Designers always have a hard time making their designs IE6-compatible. We need CSS hacks, Javascript and other means of making the website looking at least usable on this browser. These hacks can un-validate the markup or CSS, making your website’s layout less future-proof and trusted.
So what’s my point?
My idea would be to not use any style sheets in case we come across this browser, and instead show a dialog or message on top of the window that the user should try a decent browser for our design. Of course, there are simplistic-design websites which still look good viewed in IE6 – which don’t use advanced/modern techniques that can be still used with success while viewed in this browser. But what about the rest of our modern designs? Another alternative would be to use pushup.
We’re still supposed to use valid and semantic markup, so the page’s content will still be viewed and understood correctly.
Please let me know what you think about my thoughts.
Thanks!
My Silent Blue WordPress Theme was approved upon my submission to the wordpress.org theme directory today. It’s my first theme that I got to submit there and I’m pretty sure it’s just the first one 
As soon as I’ll get time to work on some other ideas I have, I’ll go back there and submit them.
You can go get it @ wordpress.org. Feel free to make suggestions and to rate it. As my time will permit, I promise you I will take them into account. Thanks for supporting my theme!
Cristi
For those of you who’ve been following my last tweets, you might have found out that I was really anxious to finish my second version of my website. As usual, I’ve been pretty deep in work lately, so this took more than I wanted to. But it’s finally here, and it should last more than the previous one (which I made in under a day of work, and I’m not that content of).
For the technical details – I used WordPress as CMS and blogging platform. I developed the custom theme (which is – surprisingly – called the SeenChris Theme lol) and 2 plugins to manage the portfolio and testimonials. Designed in Photoshop, split in HTML and CSS, using jQuery for the quiet but nice effects (+ jQuery Corners for the rounded stuff all over the site).
I hope you enjoy it and maybe you can drop me a line of feedback with what you dislike or like about it. I *will* come back with blog articles, too I’m just glad I finished the website for now.
That being said, I wish you a more productive & collaborative 2010!
Cristi