This is the best SEO project I've ever seen a YC company do. (Brief rationale: it is much more linkable than Wufoo proper, targets a link-rich audience, is beautiful, is evergreen, parallelizes over a sizable basket of keywords, is squarely topical for the business, leverages earned rep as domain experts, etc.)
On a related note, I think the HTML spec should explicitly define default <i>styles</i> for each type of input. Each input should also be fully customizable with CSS rules (I'm looking at you, radio, checkbox, and select). It's a pain in the ass to make a form look good, and using JS to replace the inputs is a hacky solution. <i>All</i> the major browser makers use custom input styles on their own websites — clearly, inheriting the styles of the operating system is nonsense. (if OS styles are to be inherited, at least make them easy to modify with CSS).
According to the chart, IE9 supports just one feature: the output tag. "The <output> element is the semantically correct element for displaying the results of a calculation from form elements."<p>My questions is... why did they decide to implement that one, out of the whole bunch?!
I'm somewhat disappointed when charts like this use pre-release browser versions like Firefox 4 beta. If you're going to compare apples with apples, you have to use released, production versions of each browser for comparison charts.<p>Otherwise, why not include Webkit nightlies and the Chrome dev version? Maybe that would just make Firefox look even further behind.
Very interesting page, too bad the take away for me is... that I won't be able to use any of those nifty new features for the foreseeable future since a sizable chunk of the audience will have IE.
Did you know there isn't a single mobile device that supports "contenteditable" (designmode) yet?<p>Not even android with Chrome, I was surprised (and it's nowhere in wufoo's lists).<p><a href="http://caniuse.com/contenteditable" rel="nofollow">http://caniuse.com/contenteditable</a><p>So no rich-wysiwyg forms for mobile (unless you can use Flash or native interface somehow)<p>and nothing else likely in 2011 - sad to see.
There are a lot of javascript libraries and plugins for form validation, but are there any for simply providing validation and filtering functionality for the browsers that don't support all the HTML5 form features? Something that detected whether a feature worked and, if not, set up a fallback would be very useful.
I'm curious why Microsoft just doesn't drop Trident, and replace it with Webkit. I'm sure it will bring them and endless amount of great publicity.<p>There should really be just one rendering engine. Dare to dream..
If anyone from wufoo's around:
Beautiful work guys! One tiny typo:<p>The <input type=tel> link on the index page is incorrectly going to:
<a href="http://wufoo.com/html5/types/1-tel.html" rel="nofollow">http://wufoo.com/html5/types/1-tel.html</a>
When it should be going to:
<a href="http://wufoo.com/html5/types/2-tel.html" rel="nofollow">http://wufoo.com/html5/types/2-tel.html</a>
For what looks like a pretty sweet library to take care of graceful degradation, take a look at JQuery Tools:<p><a href="http://flowplayer.org/tools/release-notes/index.html#form" rel="nofollow">http://flowplayer.org/tools/release-notes/index.html#form</a><p>They claim a size of ~5K over plain old JQuery and let you write HTML5 form markup even for IE6.
I'm sure it will all work really well in about fifteen years when everyone is talking about HTML6 or whatever - and there will be twice as many browsers to worry about.