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Not obligating http:// or https:// in a url field of a contact form
I have a simple HTML-PHP-CSS contact form (no JavaScript) with an input type="url" field.
Currently in 30/03/2021, the default behavior of input type="url" (by W3C design I guess) is to obligate the user to add http:// or https:// before its URL (which is most likely be just a domain such as example.com in my own usecase) but I want that my contact form users won't be have to do that.
I have found some StackOverflow posts about this matter with answers involving regex but I would prefer a way without regex (not because I don't like regex, but because I just want to keep the contact form source code as simple as possible).
Is my desire currently feasible or I must use some regex patterned cutting mechanism by PHP or JavaScript?
1 answer
input type="url" works like this by design:
An empty string ("") indicating that the user did not enter a value or that the value was removed. A single properly-formed absolute URL. This doesn't necessarily mean the URL address exists, but it is at least formatted correctly. In simple terms, this means urlscheme://restofurl.
While most users do not care about it, there are lot of URI schemes out there and the scheme must be provided.
Even in the specific case of http/s, if the web application is correctly configured to automatically redirect http to https or it does not have a certificate, inferring the scheme might fail.
As a side note, I have such inputs in various applications used by non-tech folks and they are fine with it. This is supported by copy-pasting from the URL address bar in most browser (e.g. Chrome does not show it, but when you copy the URL you also get the scheme).
So, shortly put, unless there is a very strong reason not to request the scheme, I think you should only accept only valid URLs, that is with http or https.
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