Providing hints to the user of errors on their part

[jamietanna]

Re-sharing w3c#122

The other day I was planning on raising a bug with several of the Micropub clients I use to report that they do not replay error messages to the user, i.e. to let them know that something they've sent may be invalid.

In the Error Response section, we describe the error_description key in the response (emphasis mine):

The response body MAY also contain an error_description property with a human-readable description of the error message, used to assist the client developer in understanding the error. This is not meant to be shown to the end user.

I have taken care within my Micropub server to populate this field with information that may help diagnose why things have been rejected i.e. the Micropub client / user has submitted something that fails validation my server requires.

If we do not expect the error_description to be shown to the user, do we have any recommended solutions for improving the UX of errors within the Micropub world, to hint to the user if there is something they can resolve on their side?