On-Screen Controls and Widgets

The new elements you’ve seen so far are all based on a simple text box, but some form elements also provide richer on-screen controls; in HTML 4.01, for instance, think of select and checkbox. But as I mentioned in the introduction, many other widget types are commonly used by developers and designers—think of date pickers and number range sliders—so HTML5 has adopted and standardized these patterns.

How these controls and widgets appear depends on the browser and platform in which they’ve been implemented; the HTML5 specification notes only that these controls could be used and isn’t prescriptive as to how they appear. If a browser doesn’t support the controls natively, they should fall back to look like a standard ...

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