Ok. It seems the best solution is to just remove the "suffering from being too long" state and simply require that authors not let authors enter values longer than the maxlength. Right?
I agree removing tooLong validity. Google Chrome 10 has the interactive validation, and is causing some compatibility issues about maxlength. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=4f612fe2abafc365&hl=en -- TAMURA Kent Software Engineer, Google