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Comment by m000 | Hacker News Reader

> Asterisks are an invention of WEB. Operating systems usually don't use them at all.

What kind of horseshit is this? With a 5" wikipedia search:

> In the Middle Ages, the asterisk was used to emphasize a particular part of text, often linking those parts of the text to a marginal comment.

That's practically identical to the use of asterisks on the web: pointing to a side note that says that these fields are mandatory.

Also, the examples used to demo the asterisk counter-proposals are cherry-picked to be super simple. The minute your form becomes more complicated than "email/password/phone", the counter-proposals become inferior to simply using an asterisk.

PS. Who the hell spells web as "WEB" in 2022? In fact when "WEB" was ever considered proper, outside of all-caps headings?

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I believe he means "the use of asterisks to mark required fields" was invented for the web. Otherwise, you'd have to be quite young and quite sheltered to not have seen asterisks in places older than the web.

Except I've seen the same on paper forms plenty of times in the past, they point at a footnote saying "Required".

It's hardly the same thing. A footnote is used for any relevant information that doesn't belong for whatever reason in the body of the text. That it could say "Required" seems neither here nor there.

> A footnote is used for any relevant information

Yes, and the one on paper forms almost always was used for "required".

Besides, when it didn't, normally there were many of them, so they were numbered instead of an asterisk. The asterisk itself was all but reserved for "required".

> marginal comment

> side note

I find that to be disturbingly rare on the web, i.e., asterisks with no footnote do seem to have been popularized by web forms specifically. Drupal, for example, is like this, leaving the site builder to get creative if they want to add this note somewhere.

I don't have a sampling of paper forms handy to see if they, too, suffer from this, though.

> Who the hell spells web as "WEB" in 2022?

I am not familiar with the famous UI book written in Russian that the verbiage came from, but given that it is supposedly famous, it is doubtful that it was written in 2022. Fame tends to take a fair amount of time to acquire.

> In fact when "WEB" was ever considered proper, outside of all-caps headings?

Given that the book was said to be written in Russian, we can surmise that this is translated. Perhaps even by an automated tool. It is unlikely to be what one would choose if they were writing natively, but that isn't the case here.

As long as the intent is conveyed it is proper. There are no rules, just outcomes.

What forms could have existed in the Middle Ages that would necessitate using an asterisk for a required field???

The point is that it hardly matters whether you're putting an asterisk near a piece of text or near a form field. The usage is the same either way. The issue, IMHO, is when the asterisk isn't explained on the same page, because that's the point at which it evolves from "I have something else to say about this" to "this field is required."

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