In this case, they're meant to be as simple as possible and the individual field-views can do whatever they prefer, as they're the ones rendering them. The parent form only gets a `valid: true` and a `value` from the child. Since these are error messages meant to be used directly as error messages to users, it didn't seem like a big gain to do anything more.

With regard to "pain in the butt to extend" you could use `extend` and just replace that one method that returns those string, right?

InputView.extend({ getErrorMessage: function () { // return error objects instead? } })

/me shrugs

Forms really are a pain, we tried to create a simple contract between a form-view an it's child field views that was as flexible as possible so you could easily write more input types.

More on that contract here: http://ampersandjs.com/learn/forms#form-input-view-conventio...

But hey, also... easy enough to use something else entirely, it's not like the forms stuff is bundled :)