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One of the big things back then was form validation. Web pages in the late 90's were necessarily very form driven (no AJAX back then), and users were frustrate

One of the big things back then was form validation. Web pages in the late 90's were necessarily very form driven (no AJAX back then), and users were frustrated to submit a form, wait for a response, only to be told that they were missing a required input (or as you suggest, 4 digits for zip code). So there were complex frameworks to let Javascript validate the form before it was submitted - the Struts framework would even generate the Javascript for you and keep it synchronized with the backend. But yeah, there wasn't really a whole lot of functionality. You could do fancier things with the Layer API in Netscape, but it only worked in Netscape.

duxup 6y ago
Yeah wiithout validation form validation still is wonky if you want to do it on the browser / client end. I see so many "you don't need JS" articles that mention some of the basic HTML type form field validations and they're nice-ish... they're never enough.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  Yeah - OTOH, it was a double-edged sword, since you had to re-run the same validation on the server side, and you had to be careful to make sure they were in sync. Of course, this brings back painful memories of multiple occasions where somebody said, "this is dumb, we already validated it on the client side, we don't have to re-validate it on the server side" and took out the server-side validation (even after I tried in vain to explain to them why that was a security hole...)
  - duxup 6y ago
    It's just hard to avoid the whole two pronged validation situation. You just have to accept you're going to do it on both ends. If at all possible I think of client side as "active" validation with lots of feedback and such built in. Back end is "passive / defensive" where validation is more 'nope just not gonna do that'. Every time I think "let's see how much I can do this on the back end" it ends up being kinda wonky, I'm sure it is possible but just human interaction type stuff, I like it on the front. Security, detailed rules, etc, back.

duxup 6y ago

Yeah wiithout validation form validation still is wonky if you want to do it on the browser / client end. I see so many "you don't need JS" articles that mention some of the basic HTML type form field validations and they're nice-ish... they're never enough.

commandlinefan 6y ago
Yeah - OTOH, it was a double-edged sword, since you had to re-run the same validation on the server side, and you had to be careful to make sure they were in sync. Of course, this brings back painful memories of multiple occasions where somebody said, "this is dumb, we already validated it on the client side, we don't have to re-validate it on the server side" and took out the server-side validation (even after I tried in vain to explain to them why that was a security hole...)
- duxup 6y ago
  It's just hard to avoid the whole two pronged validation situation. You just have to accept you're going to do it on both ends. If at all possible I think of client side as "active" validation with lots of feedback and such built in. Back end is "passive / defensive" where validation is more 'nope just not gonna do that'. Every time I think "let's see how much I can do this on the back end" it ends up being kinda wonky, I'm sure it is possible but just human interaction type stuff, I like it on the front. Security, detailed rules, etc, back.