Question

Suppose I have a few web forms to implement. The forms contain standard greetings, validation messages (e.g. “missing name”, “email address is invalid”), errors (e.g. “temporary processing error”), etc.

Does it make sense to factor out all these text messages from the HTML and store it in an external text file so that non-technical people might edit the text ?

They say it is easier to edit text files instead of HTML. On the other hand I am afraid it would complicate the solution. What are the best practices in that field?

Answer 1

It depends from case. If texts are often edited by nontechnical people, it may make sense to move text into a separate file with simple structure. Otherwise, it indeed could complicate things.

Typically, server-side template engine is used to build pages from multiple different resources (such resources are, e.g., HTML-template files, database, configuration files, etc.). What type of resource and format of it to use is up to you and depends on situation. For example, you could store your error texts in JSON-format files like this:

{
    "name" : {
        "minlength" : {
            "value": 2,
            "error": "Name field must contain at least 2 characters"
        },
        "maxlength" : {
            "value": 255,
            "error": "Name field must contain not more than 255"
        }
    },
    "email" : {
        "pattern" : {
            "value": "some_regexp_for_email_validation",
            "error": "Please input a correct e-mail address"
        }
    }
}

In PHP in particular, JSON format can be read with json_decode() method.

An alternative to JSON is XML (though it’s typically harder to use).

By the way, it may make sense to provide a web interface to edit form error rules and texts for nontechnical people. Then implementation details would be hidden from people who shouldn’t know about them. So you could use whatever you want as for technical part of this while editors would see just a usable GUI with text fields.

You also may be interested in using ready server-side data-validation solutions like Zend Validator.