New HTML5 Form Validation

If you're using a browser that supports HTML5 form validation, which at this time includes the following: Firefox 4 Beta, Safari 5, Chrome 6, Opera 9 or an iPhone, then you may have noticed some extra markers showing up recently in form fields.

When a field is mandatory, or when the input value doesn't match the required format, you will see a small red exclamation mark within the input box. When all requirements have been satisfied this will be replaced by a green tick.

Providing real-time feedback on form input - especially for dates, email addresses and urls - makes the process of completing online forms easier and quicker.

These features will appear both on your public website (in contact and checkout forms for example) and in the admin interface you use for adding new content. Some features will have appeared automatically this week as we updated our content management system (CMS) to include them. Others need to be added manually.

If you want to take advantage of this update, you should make sure to use one of the browsers listed above, and not Internet Explorer which has little or no HTML5 support at this time.

The screen grab above is from the Chirp contact form as seen in the Safari browser.

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