💾 Archived View for gemini.turnquist.name › gemlog › 2023102719_Ass-backwards_Modern_Websites.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 09:23:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-04)
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Another rant about hypermodern websites that are painfully retro at the same time.
I was looking to buy some nice Japanese incense, MorningStar. It's available, for the in crowd, from Nippon-Kodo's store (I think it's nipponkodostore.com, but don't quote me). It's a Shopify site. So naturally, it fails to let me checkout with Palemoon after adding everything to the cart. Did I mention how slow it was getting there? Well, I did now.
So I have to use Firefox, because apparently that's what the cool kids use. Fine. Slightly faster (still slow), but at least I can checkout. Or so I thought. Put in all my details, including my email address that I've had for about 20 years. "Valid email address required" it barfs back at me. "It *is* a valid email address," I shout back to no avail.
The site is so painfully retro, in the worst way, that it still believes all email addresses end in either a 2 letter ccTLD or a 3 letter gTLD (.com, .net, .org and .edu; maybe .mil might be allowed, too). My email address ends in .name, and has been valid for 2 decades.
Since forever, either ICANN or IANA has published a list of all the valid top-level domains, some of which are as much as 8 characters long, some in a unicode form even. DO NOT TRY TO VALIDATE AN EMAIL ADDRESS BY TOP-LEVEL DOMAIN WITHOUT THIS LIST. You will reject valid addresses otherwise.
If you really feel you need to second-guess the visitor and validate their email address, the simplest and most reliable way to do it, without maintaining any lists, is to perform a DNS lookup on the part after the '@': If it has any MX records and/or and A (or AAAA) record, it is valid. If it has a CNAME, you'll need to follow that and do the same check. That will prove the is (most likely) a mail server that should be configured to receive messages.
Web developers: Get with the times on email addresses.
;Date: 2023-10-27 19:17 ;Desc: Broken email address validators abound. ;Tag: web ;Tag: email ;Tag: TLD ;Tag: Validation ;Tag: Rant ;Tag: Shopify