This is a follow up on my previous post. It intends to go into greater detail about form fields in HTML 5.

Using HTML 5 Forms

Firstly webforms2 seems to have a javascript implementation so that you can use these in all modern web browsers. The library seems to be adapting itself, but should be pretty bombproof for html5 soon.

With this you can start using

<input type="email"/>
<input type="date"/>
<input type="url"/>

all immediately.

Required Fields

There are however some bonus options. I mentioned input required in my previous post – as my commenter points out – it should be:

<input required="required"/>

Bespoke Validation

There is also the neat pattern attributes which allows you to bespoke regular expression validation for a field

<input type="text" pattern="^([A-PR-UWYZ][A-HK-Y0-9][A-HJKS-UW0-9]?
[ABEHMNPRVWXY0-9]?{1,2} [0-9][ABD-HJLNP-UW-Z]{2})$" />
<!-- uk postal code -->

Placeholder

Placeholder is some text that provides a hint to the user about what to type. It isn’t the default value.  I have seen this hacked in with Javascript several times before. Its a really good nice to have feature that can be implemented really cheaply.

Javascript and Handlers

For the form level. You can now call checkValidity() on the form to check the validity of the form.

When you submit a form using submit() with a scripted-submit tag present.

Finally if you want to do bespoke validations to a form and use the built in form validation. You can set a custom validity for the field using setCustomValidity(). An empty string indicates validity, anything else indicates an error.

Joel

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So it turns out that American’s using Bings cashback service are being ripped off very-obviously.

The problem for Microsoft is not that Butterfly Photo have carefully studied the demographics, determined that Bing customers are morons, and have decided to charge them more. The problem is that the service is fledgling, it is trying to gain traction, and any small push could send it off the rails.

I really want a quality search engine to compete with Google. If all I am going to get is a money grabbing, murdoch sourced web. Microsoft can keep theirs.  Ask is better.

update:

An article at the register announced

“Bing has boosted Microsoft’s retailer revenues by nearly 50 per cent, according to a new search-ad study.”

I wonder how that happened

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So News Corp went to Microsoft and offered a “de-list for cash” offer. Microsoft had previously punted the idea to someone else.

This for me is the great powerplay of to monoliths of the modern era. I wont say that its doomed to fail because; they’re both rich powerful organisations with huge resources. For me its a bit mad; would you voluntarily remove your site from Google? Would you go bing-only? Wierd.

Joel

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Caffeine

Caffeine will affect search rankings in a very minor way, but is a nice architectural update.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-caffeine-update/

WebCEO

Web CEO is a cracking tool for doing search engine optimisation analysis.

Good Content

Good Content remains the single most important factor in search marketing. And will be forever.

Web-master Tools

There are a whole bunch of webmaster tools for different search engines.  They help you identify problems with your content, deal with content issues, and upload xml sitemaps.

Personal Bing Issues

I’ve found Bing to be very poor. Trying to add Smarticles digital creative agency to it, I have a lag of 4 weeks compare to Yahoo and Google. I submitted a sitemap,  and have followed best practice. Ask even found me by its self (pretty impressive, as I had forgotten about it).  But Bing still Bing’s badly.

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