Michael Lazar lazar.michael22 at gmail.com
Fri Jan 29 03:17:18 GMT 2021
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Hi all,
Piggybacking on the recent threads about forms in gemini, how shouldwe be handling errors with input validation? I've run into thisproblem a few times already with astrobotany and I haven't found agreat solution for it yet.
REQUEST : gemini://example.com/page/inputRESPONSE : 10 Enter a choice [yes/no]REQUEST : gemini://example.com/page/input?potatoRESPONSE : ???
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Option 1.
Return a proper error response code.
REQUEST : gemini://example.com/page/input?potatoRESPONSE : 59 Invalid choice (potato)
Pros- Feels like the semantically correct thing to do.
Cons- Many gemini clients don't display the human readable meta along the error codes (For consistency, I guess?). This results in a terribly confusing user experience.
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Option 2.
Return a new input prompt with the error message included.
REQUEST : gemini://example.com/page/input?potatoRESPONSE : 10 Invalid choice (potato). Enter a choice [yes/no]
Pros- Convenient for the user.- The UI is reasonably clean.
Cons- It can get ugly really quickly with longer error messages being concatenated on the same line as the original prompt.
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Option 3.
Return a successful response with the error as plain text.
REQUEST : gemini://example.com/page/input?potatoRESPONSE : 20 text/gemini Invalid option (potato).
Pros- Will always display the error message to the user.
Cons- No semantic indication that there was an error.- Can screw up browser history.
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I know it's blasphemy but a new error code could be really nice here.Something like
54 INVALID INPUTIndicates that the query string contained a value that was notaccepted by the server. The <meta> should be a human-readableerror message that will be shown to the user. Sophisticated clientscan display the error message along with re-prompting the user withthe same input from the previous request.
Any thoughts or other ideas?
- Michael