HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
The experimental Firefox Contacts addon
http://mozillalabs.
com/blog/2010/03/contacts-in-the-browser
collects contacts
from various sources, which it uses to offer addresses when a
user comes across an
<input type=email>
. It also exposes this
contact information to website scripts through the W3C draft
Contacts API (
http://www.w3.org/2009/dap/
).
The URL input type
<input type=url>
causes the browser to ensure that the entered
field is a correct URL. A browser may offer assistance to the
user—for example, Opera shows a list of recently visited URLs
from the user's browsing history and automatically prepends
“http://” to URLs beginning with “www.” (A URL need not be a web
URL; the page could, for example, be a web-based HTML editor
in which the user may wish to use the
tel:
pseudo-protocol.)
The date input type
The
date
type is one of my favourites. We've all seen web
pages that require the user to enter a date for a fl ight, concert
ticket, etc. Because dates are tricky to enter (is the format DD-
MM-YYYY or MM-DD-YYYY or DD-MMM-YY?), developers code
JavaScript date picker widgets that vary wildly in appearance,
usability, and accessibility between sites.
<input type=date>
solves this problem. Opera, for example,
pops up a calendar widget (
Figure 3.3
).
On the BlackBerry browser in BlackBerry Device Software ver-
sion 5.0, the date input control used to implement the date input
fi e fi d fi is t h e is a m e J a v a c o m p o n e n t u is e d w fi t h fi n t h e n a t fi v e B fi a c k -
Berry calendar app (although it isn't integrated with the calendar
app). See
Figure 3.4
.
FIGURE 3.4
<input type=date>
on the BlackBerry browser.
FIGURE 3.3
Opera 10.50 renders a
calendar widget.