3 Intelligent Forms
Whether you want to book a flight, take care of your online banking, or enter
a search term in Google, without forms, none of these services would be usa-
ble. Most of the elements for interactive forms have remained unchanged since
HTML 2.0 arrived in 1995. On one hand this indicates that Tim Berners-Lee’s
design showed great foresight; on the other hand there is now a huge need to
catch up. The HTML5 specification devotes a large section to the topic of forms
and will greatly facilitate any web designer’s work.
Even though browser support is not yet overwhelming at the time of this writing
(so far, it’s only offered by Opera and the developer release of Google Chrome),
the backward compatible syntax means that we can safely use the new form ele-
ments now.