Today, while trying to request an online service from my city, I accidentally entered one of the required data incorrectly. The problem was that the website wouldn’t allow me to manually correct it, because the HTML input field was disabled. This made it impossible to continue the entire process, as the validation would always fail.

In this case, a normal person would probably be forced to file a complaint to try to resolve the issue, but I couldn’t stop there.

Not satisfied, I opened the browser’s developer tools and checked what the site was doing while I was trying to request the service. I noticed that all communications with the API were made with a simple XHR request, where the data I filled in was copied to the request body.

So, I figured I could simply remove the disabled attribute from the input tag, correct the information, and try again.

To my surprise, it worked perfectly.