not clear to me whether the problem is with the ujs driver or the jquery-validate plugin…
when using jquery UJS driver (most recent, from github) + jquery-validate plugin (most recent, from github) + ajax form (via the data-remote tag), the validation rules are silently ignored. only in IE 8, chrome and FF work fine
tested with jquery 1.4.4 and jquery 1.5.1, using most recent jquery-validation from github.
here is a simple example:
http://avioing.com/validate/example.html and
http://avioing.com/validate/example_no_ujs.html
try submitting the form while leaving the cityfield empty. nothing will happen in the first case. you will see a validation message triggered in the second case.
the only difference between the two files is that i removed “data-remote” tag from the form in the latter file, and now validation is triggered.
I posted this as an issue on jquery-ujs/github, and with the help of the jquery-ujs team we identified an issue which involves IE < 9, jquery, and jquery-ujs, and the way submit event bubbling is handled in IE vs. other browsers.
the jquery-ujs team developed a work-around (see discussion here https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs/pull/123), but as of this writing the fix has not yet been pulled into the jquery-ujs tree. the concern is whether the issue should be fixed in jquery or jquery-ujs.
in the meantime, i believe that you can manually patch your rails.js to work around this issue based on the pull request on github.