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Comment by dematz | Hacker News Reader

This comment by yurishimo should not be [dead], imo

>Just a heads up but datalist is not really a great solution if you need a strong contract. The user can still type whatever they want into the field and there is no fuzzy filtering or typo mitigation. Once you add those requirements, a library that gives you a more fully featured combobox is likely going to make a lot of sense in your project.

It is true! HTML can do a lot of cool stuff, it might get you 100% of the way depending on what you're doing. But if you have a lot of forms where users pick from a value set, and want to enforce no other strings and get a good search experience, datalist does not get you there.

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Thanks for the vouch! The rest of the article was indeed good but I find a lot of value in hacker news comments precisely because someone comes back to the comments and lays out why what I just read might need a different perspective. If you just want to see cool stuff that a browser can technically do, we are all capable of reading the Chrome dev blog, but we come to HN for a wider perspective. Someone telling a war story about how some little tidbit came back to bite them is also valuable (imo).

I mildly disagree. You still have to validate what the browser gives you. The user could have edited the "strong contract" using browser dev tools.

So, let the user type, then validate in javascript if you want instant feedback (by changing colors, say, to red / orange), but ideally don't fully block it from being seen by the server. And do the real validation on the server side. This is what I found to be fairly robust, while allowing mitigations if a bad rollout breaks something (delivering to clients is slower than updating something on the server side, most often).

GP was addressing the client-side UX, not backend validation, which is an orthogonal concern.

Where did I say to forgo backend validation? Of course you validate on the backend as well, but the better UX would be to prevent the user from entering a bad value to begin with, assuming it fits within your team’s performance budget.

I’m not advocating for willy-nilly package inclusion, just highlighting a current shortcoming of datalist that is often not mentioned in these sorts of articles.

That solves the validation portion, but not the rest of the UX issues

(iirc if you have [showdead] on you can click on the timestamp to the comment and will get a [vouch] option as a reverse-flag, fwiw. i see it and don't have showdead enabled, so enough people have re-vouched it!)

I did not know that and I’ve been here quite a while…

Then you get to be today's 10,000 to the rest of the undocumented Hacker News features:

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flaggi...

I seem to recall there was a proposal to add such thing to <select>s

I definitely remember seeing a post by a Chromium maintainer talking about starting development on a proof of concept implementation and surveying for semantics.

The field can be enhanced with JavaScript to support filtering or typo mitigation.

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