[SalesForce] apex:pageMessages includes the entire component tree path for a apex:inputText with required=”true”

As an experiment I added a mock apex:pageBlockSection immediately after the apex:pageBlock on the page.

<apex:page standardController="Account">
    <apex:form>
        <apex:pageBlock title="My Content" mode="edit">

            <!-- HACK: Fake pbSection to inject the twistSection JS function -->
            <apex:pageBlockSection title="Test" showHeader="true" rendered="false">
                <apex:pageBlockSectionItem >
                    <apex:outputText value="Label" />
                    <apex:outputText value="Value" />
                </apex:pageBlockSectionItem>
            </apex:pageBlockSection>

           <!-- Existing content -->

        </apex:pageBlock>
    </apex:form>
</apex:page>

This seemed sufficient to get Salesforce to inject the missing JavaScript function. Note that it didn't need to be rendered to get the script defined.

Salesforce does not add the required HTML attribute to your fields when setting required="true" on a component.

Setting the component's required attribute indicates that Salesforce should validate that the field is required on the server-side. This differs from the HTML version of the required attribute which does the validation on the client-side.

What you are seeing is the expected behaviour.

If you add an apex:pageMessages component to your page and try and call an action or anything that will submit your form then you should get an error message if your apex:inputSecret is blank.