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