I'm having a rather bitter affair with my client who also happens to be my boss at office. He is a completely non-technical dumb muggle in terms of application development. The frustrating thing is that he and his ego requires me to put a lot of extra effort in validating and strictly enforcing the user input to be of fixed formats.
For instance, telephone numbers should only be like 1234-123456-12
and people names should only contain alphabets and spaces and no other characters. Feels like the North Korean regime..
In terms of expert UX design, does an application really need to have such extensive unnecessary validations on it's forms? Is it ok to permit the user to enter anything he likes in the input fields? Except SQL injections and JavaScript snippets ofcourse. If so then what argument should I use to convince my client that these extra efforts are completely futile?