This advice should probably extend to a variety of form elements. Like DRM and a lot of other efforts to “control” things, aggressive validators invariably pun

This advice should probably extend to a variety of form elements. Like DRM and a lot of other efforts to “control” things, aggressive validators invariably punish people who are just trying to do legitimate things. Don’t piss off your real customers. I used to live in a town with a 12-letter name, and more than once a form decided that it knew the Universal Sensible Maximum Length of Town Names and wouldn’t let me type the last couple characters. And it usually doesn’t stop there, because once a site is incapable of storing things sensibly it invariably starts to have trouble matching things, giving errors that are just plain stupid (e.g. “this other thing doesn’t match what you entered”, well no shit...). There is also too much thought put into what constitutes a person’s “name”. Generally, to work across all possible cultures, use a single, very long text field that can contain whatever the person decides to type. After accepting their input as-is, feel free to internally perform parsing logic to try to allow additional database queries but under no circumstances should your page make any assumptions. The real “you should be fired as database administrator” mistake though is to store modified data without telling the user. This usually happens with passwords; I use a site for months and then one day accidentally hit Return too soon and my password works anyway, meaning they just CLIPPED whatever strong password I entered and stored whatever they felt like (usually 8 characters). NEVER do things like that without telling the user.