[Sigia-l] Registration form field character limits

[Ziya Oz]

Jonathan Baker-Bates:

> Why these limits can't simply be system maximums based on technical parameters
> (and therefore hopefully very large), I know not.

One word: context. ;-)

This is a perfect display of the absurdity of "best practices." If one's not
running a Google/Yahoo scale operation, saving storage space of a few chars
by limiting input is an asinine way to annoy users.

A couple of people have raised off-list the issue of search speed, because
fixed-length fields are faster to index/retrieve. First of all, that's not
factually true in all cases. It all depends of how, in fact, indexes are
built, flushed, updated and cached. The *overall* speed of data retrieval
(actual and as perceived by users) depends on many inter-related factors.
There are many ways to build compound indexes, pre-calculated fields,
clusters, various set theory approaches, etc. This aspect of data input is
rarely the cause of request-response delay in most web apps.

I'm not suggesting that a field that will contain nothing but two-letter
U.S. State designations is better handled as a blob, but, beyond the
blindingly obvious, most artificial limits to text length end up being not
much more than some DBA whose knowledge of data storage and retrieval is
limited by best practice nonsense.

One can parse what comes from the front-end input and do all sorts of things
*before* committing data to a DB. What happens in that process should not
inconvenience users just because the house DBA can't be bothered by a few
lines of regex or text scrubbing routines.

Y2K is over, we're in the 21st century now. :-)

----
Ziya

Usability >  Simplify the Solution
Design >  Simplify the Problem