Historically, forms have been a pain to style consistently cross-browser. They also require JavaScript to validate the inputs and lack specific input types to deal with everyday information like telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and URLs.
The good news is that HTML5 largely solves these common problems. Let's get familiar with the new HTML5 form features and see how they alleviate our traditional form-building burden.
Using HTML5 to code our forms brings an additional benefit when used for responsive designs; it once more allows us to trim our code base to provide the leanest possible pages for our users. For the browsers that don't support these new features, we have tools to patch them up and bring them in line.
In this chapter, we will learn how to use HTML5 to:
Easily insert placeholder text into relevant form fields
Disable auto-completion of form fields where necessary
Set certain fields to be required before submission
Specify different input...