I saw Christian speak on this topic at Smashing Conference in Barcelona. Here, he takes a long hard look at some of the little things that sites get wrong when doing validating forms on the fly. It’s all good sensible stuff, although it sounds a bit medical when he takes about “Premature Inline Validation.”
Chris walks through a really good example of an HTML web component he made for NASA: wrapping a regular form element in a custom element to add Ajax functionality.
This approach let me slash the JavaScript used for this project in half, easily progressively enhance the UI, and provide an authoring approach that’s much easier to read and make sense of.
The capture attribute is pretty nifty—and I just love that you get so much power in a declarative way:
<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="environment">
Paul Ford:
The web was born to distribute information on computers, but the technology industry can never leave well enough alone. It needs to make everything into software. To the point that your internet browser is basically no longer a magical book of links but a virtual machine that can simulate a full-fledged computer.
This is an excellent initiate spearheaded by Nicole and Sarah at Google! They want to fund research into important web UI work: accessibility, form controls, layout, and so on. If that sounds like something you’ve always wanted to do, but lacked the means, fill in the form.
Apparently the sentence forms that I kicked off with Huffduffer are making a comeback.
Some buggy behaviour has been fixed in iOS 18 but now there’s a new bit of weirdness.
HTML web components for augmenting date inputs.
A little fix for Safari.
If you’re going to toggle the display of content with CSS, make sure the more complex selector does the hiding, not the showing.
A question via email…