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Forms are hard

Points of reference

I looked at:

  • HTML forms
  • Angular (some of our old apps)
  • jQuery (old donate form)
  • React (new donate form, login)

Conclusions

The Angular, jQuery, and React implementations were:

  • verbose
  • too rigid to easily allow for new fields or changes in structure
  • abstractions quickly become useless/too rigid
  • error handling logic is complex, under-abstracted
  • prone to state bugs

HTML forms (i.e. no javascript) are much simpler and less rigid, but the mechanisms available for validation and error messages are too primitive to allow for a good user experience.

Verdict: they all suck.

Why are forms hard?

Large and complex data models

Even a simple email field has:

  • a starting value
  • a current value
  • a human-readable label
  • a machine-readable label
  • multiple validations

Forms and form sections also have their own state, such as whether users have tried to submit the form, or whether the entire form is valid.

Good user experience requires extremely variable UI structures

Wouldn't it be nice if we could just loop through our data model and generate inputs?

Unfortunately, building a good user experience often requires a lot of nested html structures and classes specific to the needs of each field/section.

In summary,

Large and complex data models + variable nested UI = x_x

Existing libraries

Examples:

Where do they fail?

  • over-abstracting the UI or required rigid component structures
  • lacking utilties for handling error display in a robust way
  • not accounting for multi-step forms
  • hard to inject state to test