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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

This is reductionist and myopic. I've personally been through building forms online and it's hell to try to find consensus on perhaps the most common forms used online.

Let's take a credit card form:

- Do I let the user copy and paste values in?

- Do I let them use IE6?

- Do I need to test for the user using an esotoric browser (Brave) with an esoteric password manager (KeePassXC)?

- Do I make it accessible for someone's OpenClaw bot to use it?

- Do I make it inaccessible to a nefarious actor who uses OpenClaw to use it?

I could go on...

Balancing accessibility and usability is hard.[0]

[0] Steve Yegge's platform rant - https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

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All you need to do is use standard HTML form elements. None of those questions are even relevant, just excuses to increase complexity and make things harder for everyone.

Today I accidentally transposed the first two digits on my CC number.

The form programmer had done some super stupid validation that didn't allow me to edit it directly. Every change moves the cursor to the end of the input. More than 16 characters could not be typed.

Any person who codes that PoS should have their software license revoked and never be allowed in the industry again. Far better to use a plain text input than all the effort used to make users lives hell.

Why would you ever disable paste? It can only make it more likely that the user will make a mistake (and hate you for making the form harder to fill out).

I have an AutoHotkey that just takes whatever is in my clipboard and sends it through as individual virtual keystrokes, specifically for defeating paste-disabled form fields.

It gets way more use than I wish it did.

The thing that winds me up about credit card input is that it won't let me enter it as it is written on my card, in groups of four digits.

The same applies to fields that expect telephone numbers. They should all accept arbitrary amounts of white-space.

If you don't allow me to paste a card number in I might well not buy from you.

Funny, I'd assume we'd got consensus on that one.

- Anyone who recommends disabling paste as a security feature is a fraud

- Doing UA sniffing is always a mistake

- If the user's browser doesn't support `autocomplete="cc-number"` then they're already used to it not working, you don't need to care about it

- You should always make your form as accessible as possible regardless of if the user is a robot or visually impaired

- Making your website intentionally inaccessible may be a federal crime in the USA as the ADA doesn't care what you think about openclaw.

Yeah most of these "issues" are surely caused by programmers trying to be too smart. The dumbest possible solution which messes around with the input at little as possible is almost always the best solution. Which implies the browser-provided elements are the best because they have probably been designed and validated more than you can do.

If I use an app and it fucks around with the cursor: instant hatred. It's just so annoying. And if you can't get basic human interaction done well in 2026, what else is messed up in your app?

This is the kind of thinking that takes a normal credit card form and makes it so weird that auto fill doesn't work.

You can just do nothing and it will work. It's also the easiest and cheapest option.

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