Posts Tagged ‘HTML’

Tip: Multi-step form handling

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

First of all, sorry for my long absence! I haven’t abandoned this blog, I was just really, really busy. I’m still busy, and this probably won’t change soon. However, I will still blog when I get too fed up with work or studying (this is one of these moments…). Now, let’s get to the meat.

The situation

In most web applications, even the simplest ones, the need for form handling will arise. There will be forms that need to be submitted, checked, processed or returned to the user informing them about any errors. A good empirical rule I try to follow is “Try not to produce URLs that don’t have a meaning if accessed directly”. It sounds simple and common-sense, doesn’t it? However, as Francois Voltaire said, “common sense is not so common”. I’ve seen variations of the following scenario several times, in several websites or even commercial web application software: (more…)

On native, single-input, multiple file uploads

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

If you are following the current news on web development, you probably heard that the new Safari 4 has a great feature: It natively allows the user to select multiple files via a single input control, if you specify a value for the attribute multiple:

<input type="file" multiple>

or, in XHTML:

<input type="file" multiple="multiple" />

You might not know that Opera supported multiple file uploads for a while now, based on the earlier Web Forms 2.0 standard in a slightly different (and more flexible) format:

<input type="file" min="1" max="9999″ />

(more…)