HTML5 and CSS3, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3Creating User-Friendly Web Forms

If you’ve ever designed a complicated user interface, you know how limiting the basic HTML form controls are. You’re stuck using text fields, select menus, radio buttons, checkboxes, and sometimes the even clunkier multiple select lists that you constantly have to explain to your users how to use. (“Hold down the Ctrl key and click the entries you want, unless you’re on a Mac, in which case you use the Cmd key.”)

So, you do what all good web developers do—you turn to jQuery UI,^[16] or you roll your own controls and features using a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But when you look at a form that has sliders, calendar controls, spinboxes, autocomplete fields, and visual editors, you quickly ...