Comments on: HTML 5 WordPress contact form plugin

By: jeff68

jeff68 — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 16:17:32 +0000

Introducing HTML5 by Bruce Lawson and Remy SharpI

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:28:17 +0000

Having come to this page through a google search on how to turn autofocus off, I have to second the criticism. On very many pages, the first thing I do is to hit the space key to scroll down one page (to by pass the adverts, repeated introductory information, whatnot, that many pages have before the actual contents). With autofocus the result is that a space is entered into the form field. Similarly, after a search, it is almost always the case that I scroll down to review the search results outside of the original screen-full. Again autofocus is my enemy.

As a general rule: Never presume to know what is best for the user, nor how the user should behave on your site/with your software, etc. More often than not you will be sabotaging rather than helping.

By: Ian Hickson

Ian Hickson — Wed, 20 May 2009 22:18:34 +0000

The autofocus=”" attribute, being declarative rather than scripted, can be disabled by the user agent, and can be tweaked to work in ways that make more sense (e.g. not screwing up screen readers).

By: Bruce

Bruce — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:16:44 +0000

Hi Alan, the pink never actually changes; it means a required field (actually some testing CSS that I never turned off!

I’m planning to introduce some better styles for input[required], textarea[required] on Friday).

I used to have a full-content RSS, but I got tired of spam blogs scraping all my content, every time, and sticking their ads next to it.

By: Alan Hogan

Alan Hogan — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:12:35 +0000

In Safari 4 (latest beta) and mobile safari (iPhone OS 3.0b5) the pink fields never change color (I assumed they were supposed to look more friendly when a valid response was entered, but on second thought that may not be the case).

I also suggest you enable full-content RSS, because waiting for a page to load to continue reading an article that *could* be in my news reader (especially when using the iPhone version of NetNewsWire) isn’t fun. I recently enabled full RSS on my own site.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Wed, 20 May 2009 08:03:18 +0000

Because I'm not The Man, I asked on twitter about autofocussing. Here are some of the comments I received: FataL said "autofocusing drives me nuts sometimes, especially when I navigate through tabs with [1] [2] keys in Opera. Woud like option to off." (sounds like a browser setting to me, too) ahiggi (a screenreader user) pointed out that "most assistive technology [is] now very good at alerting user they're in form field so not being aware isn't the issue it used to be", pointing out that autofocus damages accessibility "only if you have place holder text in there that isn't highlighted hence not deleted when user types" Derek Featherstone said "consider impact on keyboard navigation eg using backspace or Alt/Cmd left arrow goes back in history, but not when autofocus is used". Derek continued that autofocus "also creates other usability problem in that if done on a slow-loading page, user can be typing and have focus stolen away", but in my interview with Ian Hickson, the editor of the HTML 5 spec, Hixie suggested that this was a misplaced worry: "now you can just say autofocus="" to focus a form field when the page loads, instead of using control.focus(), which allows the browser to do clever things like not actually focus the control if the user is already typing elsewhere". Thanks to all those who gave me feedback. Meanwhile, I have a cunning plan that will allow me to continue to get the usability benefits of autofocus for those who aren't using an assistive technology, while not damaging the experience for those who do. Naturally (having just released a plugin) I shall have to change it. Stay tuned.