Chris’ Corner: Things I Totally Didn’t Know About That I Learned From Taking the State of HTML 2023 Survey

Lea Verou helped craft the State of HTML 2023 Survey — the first of it’s kind! HTML, you say? What is there to ask? HTML isn’t exactly what I’d think of as a fast-moving technology. I hear there is a element now, so that’s new. It’s sugar for . I like it. Is […]

  Tutorial   Nov 24, 2024   0  Add to Reading List

Lea Verou helped craft the State of HTML 2023 Survey — the first of it’s kind! HTML, you say? What is there to ask? HTML isn’t exactly what I’d think of as a fast-moving technology. I hear there is a element now, so that’s new. It’s sugar for

. I like it. Is there much more than that? Well lemme just have a click over to the survey and take it for myself. ????. Uhm yes there is much more than that.

I actually do try to keep up with this sort of thing, and I’ll tell ya going through this survey had me clicking that “???? Never heard of it” choice quite a bit. Allow me to pick out a few that surprised me.

  1. I didn’t know you could programmatically open an input’s UI. Like if you have a reference to it, you can dateInput.showPicker(). Funny twist though, you can’t try it within the CodePen editor or else you’ll get a HTMLInputElement::showPicker() called from cross-origin iframe. error. It’ll work fine in Debug Mode though. I don’t think you can declaratively open it, though, right? You should be able to.
  2. I knew that you could make an element “editable” by adding the contenteditable attribute, but I didn’t know you could opt-out of the rich tech formatting with contenteditable="plaintext-only". Looks like everybody but Firefox already has it. Just to make everything about me: consider the UI of the header area of a Pen. If you own it and hover over the title, you can click a little ✎ icon to edit it. We don’t use contenteditable there because I’m worried someone will copy and paste the entire Yahoo! homepage in there (kidding, kinda). But rich text is entirely irrelevant there, and this would be a nice alternative to the text-element-flip-flopped-for-a-text-input like we currently do.
  3. I didn’t know that there is a plan to allow the name attribute across multiple
    elements, which makes it so only one can be open at a time, a common “accordion” pattern. I somehow thought Safari was going to be first out of the gate with this with v17, but I was wrong. So nobody is shipping it, but I do like it. Clever idea, if a little hard to discover.
  4. I knew about