HTML5 Forms: New Controls

The following is an extract from our book, HTML5 & CSS3 for the Real World, 2nd Edition, written by Alexis Goldstein, Louis Lazaris, and Estelle Weyl. Copies are sold in stores worldwide, or you can buy it in ebook form here.

We’ve covered the new values for the input element’s type attribute, along with some attributes that are valid on most form elements. But HTML5 web forms still have more to offer us! There are five new form elements in the HTML5 forms specification: datalist, output, keygen, progress, and meter. We covered datalist above. We introduced you to progress and meter in the last chapter as they are often useful outside of forms. So let’s recap and take a look at the other two elements.

The progress and meter Elements

Two of the most well-known HTML5 elements are the progress and meter elements.

The meter element provides for a gauge, displaying a general value within a range. You provide minimum (min) and maximum (max) values, and the required value that falls between those minimum and maximum values. While many think it’s a form control with attributes similar to some numeric input types, it has no name attribute and won’t be submitted on form submission.

The meter will default the minimum value to 0, or the meter’s value, whichever is lower. The maximum value defaults to 1 or the meter’s value, whichever is higher. Use meter when there is a minimum value, a maximum value, and optimal values, and the value can go up and down like a test grade, gas tank level, or blood pressure. With these three attributes, browsers that support meter including Android 4.4+ (but not iOS7 or IE11) will show a green gauge.

meter enables us to show when a value is in the right range with the low, high, and optimum values. If the value is between min and low, the meter is yellow. If the value is between the low and high value the meter is green. If the value is between high and max, it will be red. Currently the optimum value has no noticeable effect.

The meter element should not be used to indicate progress; instead, use a progress bar to indicate the percentage of how complete a task is.

Progress attributes include max and value, with progress always being between 0 and 100% complete. The browser calculates what percentage the value is of the maximum and adjusts the length of the progress bar accordingly. It displays a partially filled gray to blue progress bar where it is fully gray at 0% and fully blue at 100%.

If no value is included, the progress bar is indeterminate. Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Firefox display indeterminate progress as animated bars, with IE styling it as animated dots.

Unlike meter, progress heads only in the direction of 100% of the max value. The presentation defaults to inline-block so you can set width and height on progress elements. Height will not change the actual height of the stylized bar (unlike meter) but will add space below it.

The output Element

The purpose of the output element is to accept and display the result of a calculation. The output element should be used when the user can see the value, but not directly manipulate it, and when the value can be derived from other values entered in the form. An example use might be the total cost calculated after shipping and taxes in a shopping cart.

The output element’s value is contained between the opening and closing tags. Generally, it will make sense to use JavaScript in the browser to update this value. The output element has a for attribute, which is used to reference the IDs of form fields whose values went into the calculation of the output element’s value.

The output element’s name and value are submitted along with the form.

The keygen element is a control for generating a public-private key pair and for submitting the public key from that key pair. Opera, Chrome, Safari, Android, and Firefox all support this element, rendering it as a drop-down menu with options for the length of the generated keys; all provide different options, though. There is still no support in iOS7 and IE11.

The keygen element introduces two new attributes: the challenge attribute specifies a string that is submitted along with the public key, and the keytype attribute specifies the type of key generated. At the time of writing, the only supported keytype value is rsa, a common algorithm used in public-key cryptography.

The contenteditable Attribute

While it is always best to use the most appropriate form element for its intended purpose, sometimes the existing form elements fall short of our needs; for example, no form control makes for a good inline WYSIWYG text editor.

There is a roundabout solution for that, though. Any element in an HTML5 document can be made editable with the contenteditable attribute. The contenteditable attribute, written simply as contenteditable or contenteditable="true", makes the element on which it is included editable. You will usually find this attribute on divs, but you can even make a style element that’s set to "display:block" editable, and change CSS on the fly. While any element that is not natively a form control will not by default be sent to the server with the rest of the form data on form submission, you can use JavaScript to send user edited content to the server asynchronously or on form submission.

If you’ve ever seen an editable profile where the element to click doesn’t look like a form control at all, there is a chance that you were actually editing a contenteditable element. Any edits made on contenteditable components actually update the DOM.

Simply adding contenteditable to an element makes that element editable in all browsers. In addition, its descendents will also be editable unless contenteditable="false" is explicitly applied to them. While this does update the DOM client side, you do have to add JavaScript to explicitly save it.

Changes to Existing Form Controls

There have been a few other changes to form controls in HTML5.

The form Element

Throughout this chapter, we’ve been talking about attributes that apply to various form field elements; however, there are also some new attributes specific to the form element itself.

First, as we’ve seen, HTML5 provides a number of ways to natively validate form fields; certain input types such as email and url, for example, as well as the required and pattern attributes. You may, however, want to use these input types and attributes for styling or semantic reasons without preventing the form being submitted. The new Boolean novalidate attribute allows a form to be submitted without native validation of its fields.

Next, forms no longer need to have the action attribute defined. You no longer need to explicitly state the URL to use it for form submission. If omitted, the form will behave as though the action were set to the current page. You can write or override the URL defined in the form’s action attribute with the formaction attribute of the button input types that activate form submission.

Lastly, the autocomplete attribute we introduced earlier can also be added directly to the form element; in this case, it will apply to all fields in that form unless those fields override it with their own autocomplete attribute.

The optgroup Element

In HTML5, you can have an optgroup as a child of another optgroup, which is useful for multilevel select menus.

The textarea Element

In HTML 4, we were required to specify a textarea element’s size by specifying values for the rows and cols attributes. In HTML5, these attributes are no longer required; you should use CSS to define a textarea’s width and height.

New in HTML5 is the wrap attribute. This attribute applies to the textarea element, and can have the values soft (the default) or hard. With soft, the text is submitted without line breaks other than those actually entered by the user, whereas hard will submit any line breaks introduced by the browser due to the size of the field. If you set the wrap to hard, you need to specify a cols attribute.

In Conclusion

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to cover everything—that should be a book in itself. This was, however, a fairly in-depth introduction. As support for HTML5 input elements and attributes grows, sites will require less and less JavaScript for client-side validation and user interface enhancements, while browsers handle most of the heavy lifting. Legacy user agents are likely to stick around for the foreseeable future, but there is no reason to avoid moving forward and using HTML5 web forms, with appropriate polyfills and fallbacks filling the gaps where required.

In the next chapter, we’ll continue fleshing out The HTML5 Herald by adding what many consider to be HTML5’s killer feature: native video and audio.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about HTML5 Forms and New Controls