A lot of the atten­tion paid to HTML5 Forms has been cen­tred around the new input types. email, url, date, and the rest are all very con­ve­nient, but for me the real­ly use­ful fea­ture is the built-in val­i­da­tion. In case you’re not aware of it, the brows­er will now han­dle all of the val­i­da­tion that we used to use JavaScript for.

This is great for the future, but although you can start using these func­tions now (in many browsers), they aren’t with­out their draw­backs — well, one big draw­back real­ly. I’m going to explain briefly the prob­lem, and then pro­pose a solution.

Read the full article

This week­end I attend­ed the Lon­don Web Stan­dards group’s State of the Brows­er, a one-day event with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of many of the major brows­er mak­ers giv­ing us sta­tus reports on their prod­ucts. Chrome, Fire­fox, Opera and Black­ber­ry were all there; a mem­ber of the IE team was due to show but had to pull out for per­son­al rea­sons (he viewed the live stream and answered some ques­tions from home). The notable absence was Safari, whose com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment is real­ly not good enough.

There were long talks and short­er break­out ses­sions, as well as plen­ty of time to socialise; the LWS must real­ly be con­grat­u­lat­ed on organ­is­ing such a good event. There was plen­ty of news and talk­ing points through­out the day — far too much, real­ly, for me to write here, so I’ll just write up notes of what I found most inter­est­ing to me.

Read the full article