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Comment by ChrisSD | Hacker News Reader

In summary the main issue is that, according to the spec, `<input type="number">` is only for numbers that are going to be parsed into a Javascript number. It has to make sense to increment, decrement or do other numerical operations on it. It's not to be used for strings or identifiers that just so happen to be numbers, e.g. credit card numbers. I'll admit this is slightly surprising to me but it does make a certain amount of sense.

The solution is to use `<input type=”text” inputmode=”numeric” pattern="[0-9]*">`.

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One good reason for this is that for things like credit card numbers, a good interface will accept leading, trailing, or interior spaces. Sites that make me type in values in exactly their own weird format are an abomination.

Site A: Ah ah ah! You put a slash in your date! No soup for you!

Site B: Ah ah ah! You didn't put a slash in your date! No soup for you!

> a good interface will accept leading, trailing, or interior spaces

Won't pattern="[0-9]*" do the exact opposite of what you're suggesting?

Yes, you're right, this isn't a great solution for credit card inputs either. They should be able handle dashes and other spacing characters and the site should be able to filter/format it automatically either on the front-end before submission or with some server-side processing. And no we don't need four different input boxes to enter a credit card numbers either.

Flexibility is key here and since many websites handle things differently (and since many of the physical cards have literal dashes on them, which they are looking at when inputting the numbers), you should be able to guide your user into the right format without them having to get error messages or other nonsense.

Not enough web designers appreciate the anxiety of having to input a credit card number or other format-varied content into input boxes.

Part of the problem is that inputs don't necessarily reflect the specific intent behind the use of certain symbols. For 99% of people using US keyboards when they input a dash in a credit card number they are using the exact same key as one would use for the minus when inputting a negative number. If you asked them to verbalize their inputs they would probably use different words for the same symbol, signifying that the meaning or intent isn't the same but even that isn't entirely reliable.

You can attempt to infer intent or meaning based on the context of the input field but often the least-problematic method is to provide instruction/hints with the field, examples of correctness, and real-time validation with specific syntax errors when invalid or unexpected data is provided. I'd argue that it would also be worthwhile to request clarity from the user when an input hits a filtering rule so that they can make clear their intent... e.g. if you assume that they're using "-" as a symbol for separation rather than simply follow that assumption, ask if that's the case and list other optional valid contexts for that symbol so they can be explicit. If they choose None of the Above or a context that is inappropriate for the field, inform them of that.

The 4-box credit card form, while pretty terrible in many ways, at least made explicit the expectations. Often we now hide the expectations and either auto-reformat what was put in the field (which can be surprising to the user or worse can modify their input to mean something other than what they intended) or do hidden filtering, which can have the same problems but doesn't even bother to inform the user of the changes.

Not to mention that some countries use . as a decimal point and , as a digit grouping separator, and others do it the other way around.

Yes, I'm rather glad I haven't had to deal with localizing decimal inputs, just displaying them.

I have had to deal with localizing date inputs though. Ugh.

Why is this "ugh"? The way I see it, we're building software for users, and we try to make it useful for them. And part of that is trying to come up with a pleasing and easy to understand design language. And another part of it is catering to different cultures and languages.

For example, afaik, the standard way Chinese dates are written is something like "2020Y02M28D" but with the Chinese characters (words) for year, month, and day, instead of Y, M D. I find this totally beautiful: it doesn't take up more space than "-" or "/" or "." as a separator, and it totally disambiguates the meaning. (Well, there is the trailing "day", so we are losing one character.). It is such a wonderful use of the fact that Chinese is using ideographic characters. Isn't it?

I enjoy creating software users find useful.

But it goes beyond "this is what they do". Users tend to do a wide range of things when entering dates and you kinda have to guess what they mean. Throw in guessing what localization should be used (it's not always clear) on top of that fuzzy system and it can become a frustrating experience for everyone involved.

> when they input a dash in a credit card number they are using the exact same key as one would use for the minus when inputting a negative number

So what? I can't imagine any possible way it would be unclear whether someone entered a credit card number or a negative number. They have different numbers of "-" in completely different places. Am I missing something?

> I'd argue that it would also be worthwhile to request clarity from the user when an input hits a filtering rule so that they can make clear their intent... e.g. if you assume that they're using "-" as a symbol for separation rather than simply follow that assumption, ask if that's the case and list other optional valid contexts for that symbol so they can be explicit. If they choose None of the Above or a context that is inappropriate for the field, inform them of that.

That sounds like such bad usability I'd assume you were joking if the rest of your post didn't sound so serious.

Note that my post isn't limited to credit card inputs, nor do I say that the request for clarity is mandatory in all fields.

What I'm advocating is a focus on ensuring the user's explicit intent rather than attempting to infer intent or making hidden assumptions that either could be wrong or exist to make things easier for the developer.

Too many times I've had to deal with data that someone optimistically sanitized or filtered client-side and then stored, only to discover the sanitizing/filtering rules were wrong and the original data provided by the user was lost because the only thing stored was the result of those rules.

> Note that my post isn't limited to credit card inputs

Not your entire post, but the part about the '-' key was pretty specific and narrow-scoped.

> What I'm advocating is a focus on ensuring the user's explicit intent rather than attempting to infer intent or making hidden assumptions that either could be wrong or exist to make things easier for the developer.

'explicit intent' sounds like a nice goal but asking the user inside the form is not going to give you good info, and it will very often annoy them.

> only to discover the sanitizing/filtering rules were wrong and the original data provided by the user was lost because the only thing stored was the result of those rules

It wouldn't hurt to store the original. Even if the user told you what they meant, they might have said the wrong thing.

> Not enough web designers appreciate the anxiety of having to input a credit card number or other format-varied content into input boxes.

I feel most of these things should be solved by browsers, not designers...

Problem is for something like credit card every single browser vendor will try to plug their own service in one way or another (think Apple Pay and Android Pay).

A fun edge case, of the million edge cases for credit cards:

If you have Japanese users, their browser/input method editor may send full-width characters by default, such as 4321 instead of 4321. You should probably honor those, but unless you wrote code to do this, you almost certainly won't. Even most Japanese sites are user-hostile here, either failing to detect them as numbers or telling the user "You wrote your number in full-width characters; please try again in half-width characters" despite them being trivially convertable.

(Disclaimer: this is professionally relevant to me and yes, Stripe Elements / Checkout do do the right thing here.)

For reference by others: You want to apply NFKC or NFKD Unicode normalization to collapse full-width Latin letters and digits to their usual form. This also widens half-width kana.

Important to note that in the article we mention we only use pattern to trigger the right keyboard in old iOS. We actually turn off HTML validation in favour of doing server side validation, we'll soon be publishing guidance on that too. Disclaimer - I work on the team.

Disclosure* - you're claiming to be on the team, not disclaiming it.

Why are you going to server-side only? I've always held that client-side validation is important for UX as it provides instant feedback and doesn't need any extra work to preserve the other data that's already been input. Obviously the inputs still need to be validated on the server e.g. to protect against things that get past (or bypass) the client-side checks, or perform more expensive validation.

We'll be publishing soon on the GOV.UK Design System, but in summary we can't make browser validation consistent with our Design System, or guarantee it's always accessible.

In our research it's commonly most often helpful to validate when the user submits as that's when you can be sure they're 'done'. There are cases when realtime helps so it's fine to add it in those situations.

It won't accept it.. in exactly the right way.

Because you can't enter spaces, they don't get submitted, and validation doesn't fail.

As long as they don't also do 'class="nopaste"' or whatever, we're golden!

That's one of the reasons I love Stripe's checkout being used everywhere and designers elsewhere basically copying them.

The internet is constantly getting better and I don't think we give that progress we've made in web design over the last few decades enough credit.

Just imagine how bad it used to be to just purchase a simple thing on an ecommerce site in the mid 2000s. Or remember what car websites used to look like vs what they look like now. Even newspaper websites like NYT are leaders with quality design.

It's easy to complain about those who still don't get it, but I feel like we've also made massive progress from the early wild-west days of the internet.

Still, I'm all for shaming those sites who still make inserting credit card numbers a pain in the ass.

> Or remember what car websites used to look like vs what they look like now.

lingscars.com ?

This site is amazing.

This might be the best website ever. It is over the top, but the theme is consistent. It reminds me of a myspace page, but if someone just wanted to be ridiculous, not unsightly.

Side note: anyone remember "I knows me some ugly myspace" from Ze Frank?

Ze Frank. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in quite some time. What an early internet vlog pioneer. I wondered what happened to him and looked him up a while back. Turns out he’s some bigwig at BuzzFeed so I guess he made out okay, but part of me misses that early enthusiasm and wonder of early internet 2.0.

He's recently restarted posting to his YouTube channel and they're definitely worth a watch.

Did you check the source code yet?

That's a glorious Ling ASCII banner. But the video referenced in the commented YouTubePlayer widget is a first for me, and absolutely hilarious: [Drugos (Despacito) LINGsCARS website promo][1]

[1]: https://youtu.be/L2GlWaeNNoU

> Made in the People's Republic of China (me, not the website... which was handcrafted by Ling, in the UK)

That's some real artisanal HTML right there. <3

I love this website. Can anyone from the UK explain what a 'mutti-car' is?

No more than I can explain 'electrodreams' or 'mackem sex', I'm afraid!

A mackem is someone from Sunderland.

And Sunderland is where the Nissan Qashqai is manufactured.

If it helps, I’m from the UK and I have no idea

The only way that makes sense to me, is that "mutti" is a short form of "mutter" in german, which means mother. So a "mom car".

Disclaimer: I'm not english, and only half german.

Brilliant. I almost wish I needed to lease a car just so I could put some business her way.

It's interesting to see how many people take certain things in web design for granted. I'd be interested to know how many readers here were in the neighborhood of 10 or 12 years old in the mid 2000s.

We've reached a point where it seems like the amount of people who know react looks pretty close to the amount of people who know CSS. CSS wasn't even a thing when I built my first site, and now the phrase "web design" isn't even really in the vernacular today.

I'm not asking anybody to get off my lawn or anything, it's just interesting.

This may not be semantically pure, but I think type="tel" is a simple and ergonomic approach to credit card input. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...

EDIT: Also more widely supported than https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...

I'm not against weird hacks where necessary, but how is this better than the GP's non-hacky suggestion?

Inputmode isn't supported by most desktop browsers but it doesn't need to be. Every mobile browser save mobile Firefox supports it.

...I wonder what's up with Mobile Firefox?

Using the same markup for desktop and mobile means less code which usually translates to fewer bugs.

It would be the same markup. It just wouldn't do anything on desktop. Which is fine because desktops generally have physical keyboards.

I apologize if you already know this, but to make sure we're on the same page: what "inputmode" does is tell phones to display the onscreen keyboard as a numpad, instead of a full set of QWERTY letters and numbers. Outside of a few edge-cases, you don't generally need that on desktop.

TBH I went on autopilot looking at MDN's browser compatibility list. Also as a user of Firefox on Android I was interested in something that works there, but type="tel" doesn't behave any better. The only advantage to not using inputmode is getting rid of an HTML validator warning, so you're right.

Also sites that accept a 07/21 expiration date but not 7/21. Even worse if they accept it but then say it's an invalid card.

I hate it when they have drop-down menu for entering your year of birth, so the older you are, the further you have to scroll, but only infants and toddlers can select the year they were born without scrolling.

A non-numeric text field is so much easier, and you should also be able enter your birth year as Roman numerals (which is even easier for millennials).

I think you're joking about Roman numerals, but millennials birth years are anything but easy to type in as a Roman numeral. For example, my birth year of 1987 is MCMLXXXVII.

Oh that's right, I meant post-millennials, who got a fresh start in MM.

Zoomers

Can’t you just type “1984” or “Alaska” while focused on the dropdown to select on modern browsers

Not on mobile

Trying to change the system because millennials have it slightly easier than you is the most “ok boomer” thing I’ve seen today ;)

Gen Z are the ones born on MM or later.

Nope! Late 90s get rolled in too. Exact dates depend on who you ask and I'd avoid using generational names altogether.

OK, MMer! ;)

I'm closer to MTV than MM

So OK MMMBopper? ;)

Exactly. Good control UX should be very liberal in what it accepts and normalize it to whatever form they want. Same goes with editing, it should allow temporary invalidity (extra or fewer digits) turn red/disable submit and then return to green when fixed.

Don't make hundreds to millions of users do extra work that could've been automated with a little more care.

Also, the expiry date should never be a date picker. I'm not trying to _choose_ a date, I'm just dumping the exact numbers from my card. I want to type, tab, type, tab, type, enter, and be done.

But wait! It gets worse: Date-of-birth fields where they use a date picker, and the default/starting date is today.

I'm a bit older than the average HM demographic, so using a date picker to scroll back many years might take hundreds of clicks. Then I made a mistake (details long forgotten) and the whole thing reset and I had to start again. On the third time around I just quit.

To put it more succinctly and without unnecessarily referring to JavaScript semantics, type="number" is for quantities, not mere strings of digits.

It's an unfortunate accident of the English language that both are commonly called ‘numbers’. We might not have had this confusion if some other language were the lingua franca of computing.

You can't entirely avoid referring to JavaScript semantics here, type="number" is for values appropriate to represent and work with as IEEE 754 doubles.

That covers a lot of ground, by design. But a 'number' it isn't.

float, floating, double, etc would have been better choices for that type...

Though 'quantity' as described in another post still sounds the best given the sub 1 and add 1 buttons.

I mean, this could've been solved by the spec using type="quantity".

Many languages have generic, ambiguous umbrella terms, it's the sloppiness of the spec picking one.

A sequence of numbers could be called, with a little approximation, a barcode. Which makes me wonder why credit cards don’t have an actual barcode to easily enter it on the computer.

The spec could’ve used type=“quantity” and there wouldn’t be as much or any confusion.

Point being, blaming the language used for writing the spec, when you readily offered up a better alternative, feels misguided to me.

Technically, number (a quantity) vs numbers (a series of numbers) would suffice. "Numeric" (as an input mode vs a number type) makes sense, too.

I think it's just an evolution of our education, preferred input devices, and specs all catching up with each other. On a desktop I just start typing numbers from the keyboard. On a smartphone I click on a credit card field, if the field expects "text" I have to click "123" then input the number using a number row with smaller target sizes. I would greatly prefer to directly show me a number pad.

> We might not have had this confusion if some other language were the lingua franca of computing.

Interestingly enough, I can confirm as a native speaker of one such language (🇸🇮Slovene), that outside of discrete mathematics and tech, the words are often used interchangeably. This suggest that the lack of a word in English isn't the cause but the effect. The distinction was likely not necessary before the modern era, so old (==all) languages never created/adopted proper terminology.

That's a good rule of thumb there :) More pedantically, credit card numbers _aren't_ numbers in the first place. They are identifiers that happen to use numerical digits. Same as phone numbers. Treating them as numbers at any point in a system is an error. My dream is this detail of the HTML spec forces people to rethink their schema design while they're at it.

See also: New England ZIP Codes, which can cause all kinds of problems.

To save a search for those who might not know off the top of their head - New England is home to leading zero ZIP codes (e.g. 02122 for Boston).

I've come across this problem a number of times. The same applies in, for example, passing IDs across in JSON where I use strings if at all possible.

Even money amount are typically challenging to treat as numeric as often that drops them into a float when you shouldn't be processing money amounts as floats.

inputmode=”numeric” and inputmode=”decimal” have different quirks between Android and iOS. inputmode also acts differently on iPad and iPhone, and the keyboard shown varies from that for pattern=, and support for inputmode is missing from iOS11 (or iOS12?). Tread carefully!

Note that type="number" is particularly horrible on iOS because it allows typing non-numeric values and then input.value just returns zero. Instead you must check input.checkValidity(), and perhaps use the CSS :invalid pseudo-selector to show the user that their entry is not valid. You cannot read the actual invalid value AFAIK on iOS (although you could simulate it by looking at key events, if you ignore selection and cut/paste).

Data entry with HTML is one area where you really want a native app, and you can get severely burnt trying to use a WebView. I have wasted months dealing with a variety of quirks over the years trying to make time entry friendly in HTML: all solutions have terrible compromises, and different browsers act quite differently (and can have nasty bugs).

Gah, that iOS issue is a nightmare.

Those iOS issues with type="number" are really interesting – thanks for sharing.

Support for inputmode was added in iOS 12.2, but initially it used the 'numeric keypad with punctuation' – is that what you mean by 'the keyboard shown varies from that for pattern='? iOS 13 updated this behaviour, so it now uses the 'correct' numeric keypad, without the punctuation keys.

The pattern attribute is still provided in order to trigger the numeric keypad on older versions of iOS. Once traffic from older iOS devices drops off we'll likely remove it.

There's a little more info here: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-frontend/issues/1449

(I work on the team)

> iOS 13 updated this behaviour, so it now uses the 'correct' numeric keypad, without the punctuation keys

The iPhone shows the 0-9 keyboard. The iPad shows the punctuation keyboard. This is not obvious, and one of the places where Mobile Safari acts differently between the two device types.

Try jsbin.com/necuzoj

That is odd. However, it looks like this matches the behaviour of <input type="number"> (both trigger the punctuation keyboard).

I didn't knew you had an inputmode and pattern tag on the html input balise

The main issue is that the numeric key pad, with larger buttons, are a lot easier to type (as predicted by Fitt's Law).

We must allow they to automatically use this keypad without the confusing behavior of the <input type=number>

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