Calendars, colour swatches, sliding widgets, client side validation: this is the nirvana that the HTML5 forms module promises. Some would say “So what? I’ve seen this on the web for years!”, and they’d be right. There have been some really brilliant people coding some really interesting widget and validation frameworks, so why should we change?

• Ease the markup learning curve: HTML5 form widgets and validation have been built to be as dead simple to markup as a select box with no JavaScript knowledge required
• It’s a W3C standard: so you know that it’ll work for years to come and if you have problems, you could always ask almost anyone in the web development community for help.
• Cellular phone support: HTML5 form fields will have optimized user interfaces appropriate for the type of device. Blackberry already has optimized versions of the date/time and color widgets and, according to Mark Pilgrim’s article A Form of Madness, the virtual keyboards that appear when using HTML5 form fields are optimized for the data being input.
• Web development tools will have to support it: It’s a safe bet that Aptana, Dreamweaver, and all the other IDEs out there will have HTML5 support.
• It’s HTML5: when you tell your non-techie co-workers that you use it, you will be the envy of all — after all, it must be five times better than regular HTML, right? Your boss will be so impressed that you are now a guru in this futuristic technology with a cool numbered acronym that he or she will give you a big fat raise!!!

  (Okay, okay. Don’t try to laugh too hard … your co-workers will start to worry).

The Support Dilemma

Unfortunately, today’s support for the HTML5 Form Module is spotty with each browser supporting different parts of the specification. Take a look at Wikipedia’s HTML5 Forms comparison chart. You’ll see each browser supporting a different set of features, but the lowest common denominator they all support is rather small.

But I Want To Use It Now!!!

HTML5 Forms started off as WebForms 2.0 back in 2004, so I wasn’t surprised to see that a few developers had already coded some JavaScript implementations. Weston Ruter’s cross browser library, webforms2.js, implements a huge chunk of it, including parts that didn’t make the transition from WebForms 2.0 to HTML5 forms (e.g. Webform 2.0′s Repetition Model).

Since widgets weren’t implemented in webforms2, I created html5Widgets.js. This interface library is independent of webforms2 – if all you want is a cross-browser HTML5 form with validation, then all you need is the original webforms2.js. If you want special widgets that are not available for all browsers, include html5Widgets.js. Since I did not want to re-invent the wheel by creating widgets from scratch, html5Widgets.js uses some really nice third party JavaScript libraries to create them (more on that below). It also uses Modernizr to detect if there is native support for each of the HTML5 form widgets – if not, html5Widgets steps in to put the right widget in place. To save bandwidth, developers only need to include the third party libraries for the widgets they need.

In the rest of this article, I will go over different parts of the HTML5 specification and show how you can use them in your applications today, step-by-step. Each section will state which browser natively supports that part of the specification, and what is needed for browsers that don’t. Eventually, when the browser manufacturers catch up with the standard, you won’t need to use any JavaScript at all.

Form Validation Using the required and pattern Attributes

The required attribute makes an input field mandatory and forces the user to enter in a value in order to submit the form data. The markup is simple

<input type="text" name="firstName" value="" required="required" />

(Note:, you can also just use required on its own if you aren’t trying to be XHTML compliant.)

The pattern attribute forces the user to enter in a value using a specified format. It uses regular expressions to define this format. For example, if you want to force the user to input a U.S. Zip Code inside a form field, you would use the following markup.

<--
     zip code regular expression from
     http://www.breakingpar.com/bkp/home.nsf/0/87256B280015193F87256F6B005294C2
-->
<input type="text" name="zipCode" value=""
   pattern="\d{5}([\-]\d{4})?" required="required"  />

Note that required and pattern are independent from each other. You can have a pattern set on a form field without it being mandatory (i.e. the pattern would only be checked if the user enters in data into the field).

Opera 10+ (mobile and desktop editions) is the only browser that supports the validation routines natively. To use this in all other browsers, all you need is to include the following script tags in the head of your document.

<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/archive/js/weston.ruter.net/webforms2/webforms2_src.js">
</script>

Let’s take a look at how this looks visually:

Opera 10+ Windows	Firefox 3.6 with webforms2.js

Note the “starred” style of the form field — this is not the default look and feel of the required fields, but something I added with a simple amount of CSS:

input[required], select[required] {
	background: #ffffee url("../images/asterix.gif")  no-repeat left 2px;
	padding-left: 1.5em;
	width: 13.5em !important;
}

(This CSS does not work in Internet Explorer 6. Given that everything else in this article does, I hope the reader will overlook this one oversight considering that this browser should have entered retirement years ago (and have its driving license taken away, and shipped off to some really horrible nursing home watching really crappy talk shows all day and eating bad food …)

See an example of pattern and required in action.

Note that the same validation framework checks the values of inputs of type email, url and number to ensure that the values are in their respective valid formats. As an added bonus, if you are using the iPhone or iPad version of Safari, the virtual keyboard that appears will be optimized for these type of form fields (e.g. when editing a number field, the keyboard that appears contains only digits and the “+”, “-”, and “.” keys. This is native behaviour for iOS, and I hope other mobile browsers, such the Android’s, follow suit.

The autofocus Attribute

The autofocus attribute allows developers to choose which element has focus when the page is loaded. The Google front page has done this via JavaScript, and now, 12 years later, there is finally an HTML attribute to easily handle this.

<input type="text" name="fullName" value=""
  required="required" autofocus="autofocus" />

Safari, Chrome and Opera support it natively. To make it work in other browsers, include the webforms2.js library, as we did in the required and pattern examples.

See an example of autofocus in action

The placeholder Attribute

A placeholder is a great visual cue to communicate any special information about a field (e.g. a description
of the data to be input, if the field is required, etc).

Syntax is simple:

<input type="text" name="fullName" value="" required="required"
   placeholder="Required information" />

Safari, Chrome and Firefox support this attribute natively. To make it work in other browsers, it is necessary to load the html5Widgets library, with the necessary supporting libraries:

<script type="text/javascript"
   src="/path/to/shared/js/modernizr.com/modernizr-1.5.min.js">
</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/EventHelpers.js">
</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/html5Widgets.js">
</script>

What do these libraries do?

• modernizr is used to detect which HTML5 attributes and tags are supported by the users’ browser
• html5Widgets is what actually does the placeholder logic, with EventHelpers.js providing cross-browser event-handling routines.

See an example of the HTML5 placeholder
tag in action.

The range Input Type and output Tag

Easily my favourite of the HTML5 widgets, range gives developers a sliding control to put inside their forms.

The syntax is simple:

<input type="range"  name="rangeEl" value="" min="0" max="150" step="1" />

The min and max attributes contain the minimum and maximum values, and step denotes by what increments the range slider increments by when moved. Note that you can use these attributes with the number input type as well, but instead of having the fancy interface, it will use the validation engine to ensure the value follows what these attributes dictate.

At the time of this writing, Opera and WebKit based browsers (like Safari and Chrome), support it natively, and html5Widgets uses the Frequency Decoder Slider Widget to implement it in unsupported browsers. To ensure cross-browser HTML5 range element goodness, place the following script tags in your document:

<!-- Needed for Range Element -->
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/shared/css/slider.css">

<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/shared/css/slider_ie.css" />
<![endif]-->

<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/frequency-decoder.com/slider.js">
</script>

<!-- Needed for Validation -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/weston.ruter.net/webforms2/webforms2_src.js">
</script>

<!-- Need for HTML5Widgets -->
<script type="text/javascript"
  src="/path/to/shared/js/modernizr.com/modernizr-1.5.min.js">
</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/html5.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/EventHelpers.js">
</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/html5Widgets.js">
</script>

Take a look at the screenshots below. You will see that the way a range field varies among the browsers that natively support it, and even in some of the browsers that use html5Widgets:

	Explorer 6.x+ (html5Widgets support)	Firefox 3.5+ (html5Widgets support)	Safari 4.0+ (native support)	Chrome 3.0+ (native support)	Opera 10.0+ (native support)
Windows
Mac	Not Applicable
Linux	Not Applicable		Not Applicable

The output tag can be used to show the value of a field, or the result of an operation performed on a number of fields, using JavaScript expressions. Although the output tag may calculate fomulas referencing any form fields, it is useful especially for the range input type so users can see what value the range element is pointing to:

<output onforminput="this.value = rangeEl.value">-</output>
<input type="range"  name="rangeEl" value="" min="0" max="150" step="1" />

The contents of the output tag is the default value. Note the this.value syntax – I am not sure why the W3C HTML5 working group decided it was needed (why not just have the formula?), but it is. If there are other types of expressions supported in the final specification, they are not supported by html5Widgets at this time. Note that in order to apply CSS to the output tag in IE, it is necessary to use Remy Sharp’s HTML5 Enabling Script.

See an example of the range input being used with the output tag.

See an example of the output tag being used without a range field.

The datetime, datetime-local, date, week and week Input Types

At the time of this writing, Opera is the only desktop browser that supports HTML5 date fields. To support the other browsers, html5Widgets uses a slightly modified version of DynArch.com‘s Ex-”Coolest” DHTML Calendar (I decided not to use the coolest one because the Ex-Coolest has a more permissive license and it works really well). Now all browsers can support the datetime, datetime-local, date, month and week input fields, and submit these values in a consistent format.

Here are the scripts needed for the browsers that need it:

<!-- Needed for Date/Time Elements -->
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/shared/js/jscalendar-1.0/calendar-win2k-1.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/jscalendar-1.0/calendar.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/jscalendar-1.0/lang/calendar-en.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/jscalendar-1.0/calendar-setup.js"></script>

<!-- Needed for Validation -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/weston.ruter.net/webforms2/webforms2_src.js">
</script>

<!-- What glues all the above together -->

<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/modernizr.com/modernizr-1.5.min.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/EventHelpers.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/shared/js/html5Widgets.js">
</script>

Note that the calendar widget uses language packs and that I am using the English one (calendar-en.js. Other language packs are included.

Below is a comparison between Opera’s native date widget vs. the one provided by the DynArch/HTML5Widget combo:

	DateTime Widget	Month Widget
Opera Windows
Opera Mac
Firefox 3.5+ Windows (html5Widgets support)

It looks like the native calendar for Opera for Mac is a smaller than the Windows version – hopefully this is just on my copy of the browser.

The display formats, and they values that they submit to the server, are pretty much the same

Input type	Format displayed on page	Format sent to server
datetime	yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM	yyyy-mm-ddTHH:MMZ
datetime-local	yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM	yyyy-mm-ddTHH:MM
date	yyyy-mm-dd	yyyy-mm-dd
month	yyyy-mm	yyyy-mm
week	yyyy-mmW	yyyy-mmW

See the HTML5 date widgets in action.

Note: In this example, The Opera Mobile Windows Emulator incorrectly displays the datetime and datetime-local calendars in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, but not the other ones. Since this is Opera’s own calendar widget, and not html5Widgets’, this bug will have to fixed by Opera.

The color Input Type

Currently none of the desktop browser manufacturers support the color input type (although the new WebKit based Blackberry browser seems to have a neat implementation). While we wait to see how the major browser manufacturers decide to implement color, you can use html5Widgets’ implementation which uses Jan Odvarko‘s jscolor. The script has been configured to allow only allow lower case hexadecimal rgb values to be entered, and that a blank value not be allowed, as per the W3C spec.

Here are the script tags needed to implement this in all browsers:

<!-- Needed for Color Element -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="../../shared/js/jscolor/jscolor.js">
</script>

<!-- What glues all the above together -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="../../shared/js/modernizr.com/modernizr-1.5.min.js">
</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="../../shared/js/EventHelpers.js">
</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="../../shared/js/html5Widgets.js">
</script>

Below is a comparison between the Blackberry’s implementation (grabbed from the Blackberry Development Blog) and HTML5Widget/jscolor’s.

Blackberry Web Browser	Firefox 3.5 with html5Widgets.js

See HTML5Widget’s implementation of the
color input type.

Note: Like other HTML syntax, color uses the unfortunate American spelling instead of the Queen’s Proper English (i.e. colour). Ensure you spell it incorrectly in order to make this work. ;-)

How Well Do These Libraries Handle the Official Specification?

I have done some testing on some existing examples that use HTML5 forms to ensure that it works the way developers expect. Here are a few examples that I have taken, with the necessary JavaScript added:

• A cool looking payment form by Inayaili de León (originally from her HTML5 forms tutorial)
• An HTML5 Form Demo by Richard Bradshaw (originally from his Fancy Forms: HTML5 + CSS3 – JS article)
• Another cool Example by Anne van Kesteren (originally from his article Improve your forms using HTML5! on the The Opera Developer Community Website).

However, the HTML5 Forms specification is large, and unfortunately, the webforms2 and html5Widgets libraries don’t implement everything … yet!!!! Since I am really motivated with what HTML5 forms can do, I am committed to completing support to most, if not all, of the HTML5 Forms specification. The version of webforms2 in this blog post has been modified from Weston Ruter’s original verison, but it will be merged with the official Google Code version in the next week or so and will include compressed versions of all the library. The html5Widgets library will also have a permanent home there.

Things that I will be working on in the near future are:

• Support for other HTML5 form elements, among other things, datalist, number, keygen, progress, time and meter
• Support for CSS styling of HTML5 form widgets as well as the ability to style form fields according to their validation state (e.g. :valid and :invalid psudo-classes). Opera seems to be the only browser currently supporting this.
• Default styling for some of the new input types, like tel, email, url. Opera for Mac and Opera Mobile are the only browsers I know of that support this for email and url.
  

  email and url form fields in Opera Mac

• Support for customizing the validation look and feel. This is one I would love to do, since I’m sure a lot of developers would want to change how validation errors appear on the screen. Unfortunately, the HTML5 specification doesn’t describe a standard way of doing this. It will be interesting to see how the browser manufacturers deal with this issue (To any browser developer reading this is working on the display form validation errors: I would love to know how you are doing this if you are willing to share. Hint, HINT! ;-))
• In Internet Explorer 7 and lower, the ability to style input types it doesn’t support natively with CSS code like input[type="range"]
• Enabling HTML5 forms validation on the server side to ensure data integrity for browser that don’t support HTML5 forms that have JavaScript disabled.
• Support for internationalization of the error messages used in webforms2. If anyone wants to help in the translation of these error messages, please drop me a line — I need help!

Below is a modified version of the Wikipedia’s HTML5 forms compatibility table and see what how things the support situation stands today.

	Trident	Gecko	WebKit	Presto
Attributes
autocomplete	Yes	Yes	Yes	2.0
list	No	No	No	2.0
required	Yes (with webforms2)	Yes (with webforms2)	Yes (with webforms2)	2.0
multiple	No	1.9.2	526	No
pattern	Yes (with webforms2)	Yes (with webforms2)	Yes (with webforms2, and natively in Nightly build)	2.0
min, max	Yes (with webforms2)	Yes (with webforms2)	Yes (with webforms2)	2.0
step	Yes (with webforms2)	Yes (with webforms2)	Yes (with webforms2 and Nightly build natively)	2.0
placeholder	Yes (with webforms2)	1.9.3	Yes	Yes (with webforms2)
form	No	1.9.3	No	2.0
autofocus	Yes (with html5Widgets)	1.9.3	Yes (with html5Widgets and Nightly build natively)	2.0
maxlength	No	1.9.3	Nightly build	2.0
novalidate	No	No	Nightly build	No
control	No	1.9.3	No	No
accept	No	1.9.3	No	No
formtarget	No	No	No	No
formaction	No	No	No	No
Elements
datalist	No	No	No	2.0
keygen	No	1.0	125	1.0
output	No	1.9.3	No	2.0
progress	No	No	Nightly build	No
meter	No	No	No	No
Input types
search	No	1.9.3	312	No
tel	No	1.9.3	Nightly build	No
url	No	No	Nightly build	2.0
email	No	No	Nightly build	2.0
datetime	Yes (with html5Widgets)	Yes (with html5Widgets)	Yes (with html5Widgets and Nightly build natively)	2.0
date
month
week
time
datetime-local
number	No	No	Nightly build	2.0
range	Yes (with html5Widgets)	Yes (with html5Widgets)	Yes	2.0
color	Yes (with html5Widgets)	Yes (with html5Widgets)	Yes (with html5Widgets and Nightly build natively)	Yes (with html5Widgets)

Integrating With visibleIf To Make Even Cooler Looking Forms

The webforms2 and html5Widgets libraries are designed to co-exist well with visibleIf to create interactive forms with fields that only validate the ones that visibleIf is displaying.

See an example of HTML5 validation working with the visibleIf JavaScript library

Acknowledgments, Shout-outs and Kudos

• Faruk Ates and Paul Irish for the definitive HTML5 and CSS3 feature detector, modernizr.
• Weston Ruter for doing the insane amount of work on webforms2 years ago.
• Brian McAllister: for making the excellent Unobtrusive slider control which I used for the range element.
• Mihai Bazon for keeping the The Ex-“Coolest” DHTML Calendar around even though he has a paid product.
• Jan Odvárko for his rocking jscolor widget.
• Remy Sharp for his fine HTML5 Enabling Script so we can force IE to style things like the output tag.
• Inayaili de Leon, Anne van Kesteren and Richard Bradshaw for allowing me to show how easy it is to make their original HTML5 Form demos work with html5Widgets.

Further Reading

• The W3C HTML5 Forms Specification Working Draft: The Working Draft is in “Last call for comments” status, so there may be some last minute changes.
• A Form of Madness: Chapter 10 of Mark Pilgrim’s great reference on HTML5.
• Web Forms 2.0 Working Draft: The WHATWG spec that the W3C spec is based on. It includes the repetition model which didn’t make it into the W3C spec

Download

This archive is the temporary home for html5Widgets. It will soon be hosted at the webforms2 Google Code page. Both html5Widgets and webforms2 both have permanent homes at github (however, the html5Widgets github page contains a copy of webforms2 in it for your convenience). Weston Ruter has been kind to give me deciding rights over the destiny of this code. I will be updating webforms2 in the near future.

Download the latest version of html5Widgets, which includes webforms2, from github.