47+ Excellent Ajax CSS Forms
47+ Excellent Ajax CSS Forms
Forms needs a solid visual structure, a profound hierarchy of form elements (Fields and Labels), powerful techniques and Functionality (AJAX) to make the form look and work creatively. There is a great bunch of creative, outstanding and individually designed from scratch forms.
Forms needs a solid visual structure, a profound hierarchy of form elements (Fields and Labels), powerful techniques and Functionality (AJAX) to make the form look and work creatively. There is a great bunch of creative, outstanding and individually designed from scratch forms.
Thanks to AJAX, we can provide real-time feedback to our users using server-side validation scripts and eliminate the need for redundant validation functions and processing data.
Let’s take a look, hopefully you’ll find new ideas you can develop further on your own.
Styling Forms
1) Uni Form - an attempt to standardize form markup (xhtml) and css, “modularize” it, to get nice looking, well structured, highly customizable, semantic, accessible and usable forms.
2) CSS-Only, Table-less Forms - A great example of a well designed form using modern css techniques. It works in Win/IE6, Firefox v1.0+, Win/Opera v8.0, has minor layout differences in Mac/Safari v1.0.3 and Mac/Safari v1.2, and is usable but fairly buggered in Mac/IE5.2.
3) Tableless Forms - has a great login form example, with a graphic in the input field.
4) A form with style - How to style and stop web forms from looking ugly.
Styling Form Elements
5) Niceforms 1.0 - is a script that will replace the most commonly used form elements with custom designed ones. One of these improvements would be the possibility of selecting a radio or check box by clicking its adjacent label, it also highlights the labels of the selected boxes to make the selections even clearer and more…
6) Fancy Form - FancyForm is a powerful checkbox replacement script used to provide the ultimate flexibility in changing the appearance and function of HTML form elements. It’s easy to use and degrades gracefully on all older, non-supporting browsers.
7) Styling form controls with CSS, revisited - 224 screenshots showing the effects of various CSS rules applied to form controls. The screenshots are taken from 8 browsers on 4 operating systems, for a total of 14 different browser + OS combinations.
8 ) Showing Good Form - Demo of accessible complex, grid-style (i.e. table-like) form using semantic markup (fieldset, legend, label etc…) and CSS.
9) Styling the Button Element with Sliding Doors - A technique that demonstrates a cross-browser technique for button elements with sliding doors.
Form Usability and Accessibility
10) Prettier Accessible Forms - Nick Rigby takes a look at how to make better and accessible forms using CSS instead of old-school tables.
11) Check it, don’t select it - An attempt to use multiple checkboxes in a scrollable list - better than using ctrl-click in a normal multi-select listbox
12) Sensible Forms - Web Usability - Roger Hudson provides a stunningly clear tutorial on how a form that is well designed with good visual layout will benefit all sighted users
Ajax Forms Processing
13) AJAX Contact Form - Excellent example of accessible AJAX. Uses unobtrusive Javascript. By Dustin Diaz.
14) AutoSuggest: An AJAX auto-complete text field - where it adds a popdown menu of suggested values to a text field. The user can either click directly on a suggestion to enter it into the field, or navigate the list using the up and down arrow keys, selecting a value using the tab key.
15) FancyUpload using Mootools - Swf meets Ajax for beautiful file uploads using Mootools.
16) jQuery Form Plugin - allows you to easily and unobtrusively upgrade HTML forms to use AJAX to gather information from the form element to determine how to manage the submit process which allows you to have full control over how the data is submitted.
17) Cforms - An AJAX Contact form plugin for Wordpress, offering convenient deployment of multiple contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.
Awesome Form Validation
18 ) Really Easy Field validation with Prototype - Here’s a form validation script that is very easy to use.
19) Live Validation - is a small open source javascript library built for giving users real-time validation information as they fill out forms.
20) Ajax form validation - Learn how to use AJAX in order to process and validate your forms.
21) fValidator - fValidator is an open source (free) unobtrusive javascript tool for easy handling form validation.
Form Field Hints
22) Validation Hints for your form - This article will explain one way of achieving Validation Hints effect while the user type using JavaScript and CSS.
23) Form Help without Popups - A nice technique for adding help info to forms without using pop-up windows.
Hide Form Fields
24) Trimming form fields - Wouldn’t it be a cool idea to give users the option to hide these optional fields at their own discretion, and with a clever use of Javascript, the DOM and some CSS we can.
Great Tips for Creating Forms
25) Tips For Creating Great Web Forms - so truly important CSS tips for all form builders out there.
26) Simple Tricks for More Usable Forms - A number of simple tricks for improving the usability of forms, and hopefully inspire you to improve on them and create your own.
A Must See Examples
31) Pretty Forms
32) AJAX CAPTCHA
34) Ext File Upload Form Widget Example
35) Control.TextArea- Prototype
36) Instant Edit
Tutorials
39) Password strength meter for your register form - A small tutorial on how to build a password strength meter like the one on Google’s new account form.
40) AJAX Form POST/GET - HTML Form Submit with AJAX/Javascript Example/Tutorial
41) Degradable Ajax Form Validation - Learn how to provide real-time feedback to the user using server-side validation scripts.
42) STYLING FILE INPUTS WITH CSS AND THE DOM - Shaun Inman shows us a guide to achieving consistent, stylish file upload inputs via clever use of js and css.
Online Form Builder
44) Wufoo Form Builder - Free HTML Form Builder - Create Forms, Surveys and Invitations and more…
45 ) Web Form Factory - is an open source web form generator which automatically generates the necessary backend code to tie your form to a database.
46) Jot Form - is a great Web based WYSIWYG form builder. You can select a form type(Contact Us, Satisfaction Survey, Job Application, Suggest Website , Membership Registration, Party RSVP , Wedding Attendance, Reservation, Submit Product, and others).
47) Form Assembly - A Beautiful Collection of CSS Stylesheets For Web Forms
Fear and Loathing in Standardsville: The IE8 Opt-in Debate
As covered last week on SitePoint by Matt Magain, Microsoft has announced that IE8 will introduce a new “browser version targeting” system that will see the browser default to rendering standards-compliant pages the same as in IE7, and will require developers to explicitly opt in to IE8’s new, Acid2-compliant rendering engine if they want it. For […]
As covered last week on SitePoint by Matt Magain, Microsoft has announced that IE8 will introduce a new “browser version targeting” system that will see the browser default to rendering standards-compliant pages the same as in IE7, and will require developers to explicitly opt in to IE8’s new, Acid2-compliant rendering engine if they want it.
For web developers that have pinned their hopes for a better world on web standards, the change Microsoft is trying to make is a scary thing.
The fundamental new idea that the ability to “lock” pages to a particular browser release would be a nice thing to have takes a little getting used to, but it’s gradually gaining acceptance. After all, browser releases come along much more often than new web standards, which makes standards-based rendering modes like the DOCTYPE switches in current browsers insufficient.
Seeing your favourite web sites suddenly go wonky when you install a new browser version may be acceptable to developers like you and me, but it will never make sense to end users, who naturally expect better of the Web. Browser version targeting lets us cleanly sidestep such unpleasantness, and enables browser developers to spend more time working on new features and less time weighing the pros and cons of fixing bugs that many sites have come to depend on being present. I recommend reading Eric Myer’s From Switches to Targets if you’re still not convinced.
“Now Life Has Killed the Dream I Dreamed”
But even if we accept browser version targeting in principle, there’s the small matter of the billions (trillions?) of web pages out there, none of which currently specify the browser versions for which they were written. Microsoft would see these pages rendered as IE7 currently renders them for the rest of time.
Some see this as letting the lazy developers of the world—who build sites for the current version of IE and nothing else—get away with writing shoddy, non-compliant code. Others see it as forcing developers to put an ugly “stamp of Microsoft” on all their pages just to get support for standards that IE should have supported for years.
Still others are simply unwilling to give up the notion that web pages are written to standards, and that it’s a browser’s solemn duty to render those pages according to those standards, or as closely as they are able, unless instructed otherwise.
Jeremy Keith is one of this last group. In Broken, he calls for developers to rally against Microsoft in an effort to convince them that the default behaviour in the absence of version targeting information should be to provide the most standards compliant rendering possible.
One of the staunchest advocates of progressive enhancement—enhancing sites using standards that are not yet supported by all browsers so that they will work better in future browsers—Keith sees in Microsoft’s default proposal the death of this promise of a brighter future for the sites we are creating today.
Shockingly to some, Web Standards Project co-founder Jeffrey Zeldman disagrees. In his piece In defense of version targeting, Zeldman comes out and tells the ugly truth: that forcing practitioners of progressive enhancement—a tiny and elite minority in the developer community—to add tags to their old sites to benefit from new IE features is a small price to pay in order to keep Microsoft on the road to better web standards support.
“It’s The End Of The World As We Know It
(And I Feel Fine)”
Taking Microsoft’s proposal at face value, you might think it was a sad day for standards-minded developers, who for years have imagined a future in which it would be enough to write sites to web standards for them to be displayed as intended in all browsers.
Call me crazy, but I believe there’s still hope, and this can be seen in some of the responses we’re seeing from other browser vendors. In and Slipping The Ball And Chain, Mozilla developer Robert O’Callahan discusses the challenges of actually implementing Microsoft’s version targeting proposal in the long run. He doesn’t expect any of the other major browsers to support version targeting for several reasons, including:
- All the other major browsers’ standards support is now so good that, in recent history at least, bug fixes in new browser versions haven’t caused significant breakage to existing web sites.
- Shipping and maintaining an ever-increasing number of legacy rendering engines with each new browser release while ensuring security and interoperability is impractical, if not downright impossible.
The thing is, if this logic can be applied to browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Opera today, it might well be applied to Internet Explorer in a few years’ time. I asked Chris Wilson about this when I interviewed him at Web Directions South late last year:
SP: “Now, with this developer opt-in model that Internet Explorer […] will eventually adopt, are browsers over time going to have, you know, five, six, seven, ten, eighteen different rendering modes […], or will this tendency of the differences to tend towards zero over time mean that one day this can go away?”
Chris Wilson: “I think that my personal hope, certainly, is that one day this gets to go away, that the differences between browser versions are not what we call internally ‘breaking changes.’ […]”
Chris went on to say that he feared there would always be room for interpretation in even the best standard specifications, which would later require browsers to make changes that could break existing pages, but that the work being done on standards today is definitely much better than it has been previously.
That, in combination with the mounting maintenance burden of preserving security, interoperability, and backwards compatibility with multiple rendering modes might give Microsoft reason to wonder whether version targeting is still necessary when IE10 rolls around.
IE8: Means to an End?
To sum up my thoughts this issue, I believe Microsoft’s move to add browser version targeting to IE8 will be difficult for standards-minded developers to accept, but is ultimately a solid solution for the real problems that are currently holding back the evolution of the Web today. If only for tackling the problems that were keeping it from fully embracing web standards, Microsoft should be commended. It could have simply put Internet Explorer on the back burner for another six years!
The decision to make HTML4/XHTML1 pages target the IE7 rendering mode by default, while understandably controversial and certainly worthy of further discussion, I believe strikes the right balance between current real-world needs and the vision of a standards-compliant future.
The silver lining for the standardistas here is that the other major vendors see little use in supporting version targeting in their browsers—certainly not enough to justify the huge development burdens that would be involved. This could be a sign of things to come for Internet Explorer.
Version targeting may just prove to be the key to getting Internet Explorer to stop dragging its heels on the road to that web standards utopia we’ve always dreamed of. And once we get there, Microsoft may well find itself in a position to rejoin the other browsers in supporting the latest standards by default, instead of by request.
This article provided by sitepoint.com.
39 Addictions - Designers just can’t stop
In order to stay focused on web standards and best practices, we have to know which trends are coming up and which technologies will become big in the future. Today we are highlighting the Top 39 established design , copywriting, SEO, Ajax and tech-related Communities that delivers the latest trends and techniques in various fields […]
In order to stay focused on web standards and best practices, we have to know which trends are coming up and which technologies will become big in the future. Today we are highlighting the Top 39 established design , copywriting, SEO, Ajax and tech-related Communities that delivers the latest trends and techniques in various fields that interest many of us.
Quality of ideas is what makes them stand out as they have some of the best web designers, developers and entrepreneurs in the web industry today.
Noupe has the honor to spend time finding those treasures and talking about those people who put love and thoughts into creation.. Lets take a look about what we consider inspiring and we think will excite you too,
Design/Tech Magazines
1) Smashing Magazine - maintained by Two incredible Guys: Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman to deliver useful and innovative information for designers and web-developers. They Realy smash us with every new post.
2) Devlounge -web designer and developer resource, featuring articles, interviews, and more related to building a better web and improving content.
3) Digital Web Magazine -is an online magazine intended for professional web designers, web developers and information architects.
4 ) A List Apart -explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
5 ) Think Vitamin -Vitamin will inspire you, teach you, advise you and sometimes test you with its in-depth features, audio interviews, training sessions and reviews.
6 ) Site Point - has a vast variety of web design tutorials and articles coupled with a vibrant and well informed community.
7) Web Design From Scratch -A complete guide to designing web sites that work.
Design Feed
8 ) Design-Feed -Hand-picked Design-Feed aggregator, showing the most interesting design related RSS feeds and present them in an easy-to-browse format.
9 ) Design Float -is a Digg style, community driven news aggregator dedicated to the design industry.
Copywriting Advice
10) Copy Blogger - Copywriting is the Key to Successful Online Marketing and Copyblogger is all about helping you get traffic, gain subscribers, attract links and sell something!
11) NorthxEast -is a blog about blogging that presents a series of weekly articles that no blogger can afford to miss.
12) Chris Garrett -E-business, online marketing and new media consultant. Information on skills, blog and technical writing.
Freelancers Resources
13) Freelance Switch -Covers all the topics freelancers need to know, they run a freelance job board and have regular. At FreelanceSwitch they’re always looking for new ways to help and entertain freelancers.
WordPress Must Read
14) Lorelle -On Lorelle on WordPress, she writes about everything WordPress and blogging, covering more than you may want to know about how all this blogging business works.
SEO and Marketing Tips
15) Alexa
16) SEOMOZ -News, Tips and highlights from the Search Marketing Industry
17) SEO Book -A leading SEO resource focused on helping successful webmasters make money and increase their profits through driving targeted traffic to their sites.
18) Performancing -Helps Bloggers Succeed, discussing SEO tips, adsense, copywriting, etc…
19) SEO Chat - All you need to know about Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization.
Personal Weblogs
20 ) Snook -is the site of web designer, developer, writer and speaker, Jonathan Snook. The articles on this site focus on web development, design, and freelance.
21) Web Designer Wall -is all about design, ideas, web trends, and tutorials. It is designed and maintained by Nick La.
22) Max Kiesler
23) 456BereaStreet
24) Shaun Inman
CSS Galleries
25) Best Web Gallery
26) CSS Mania
27) CSS Remix
AJAX Resources
28) Ajaxian -Highlights Top Ajax Examples and techniques.
29) Learning jQuery -Learning jQuery is a multi-author weblog with the aim of sharing information about jQuery library.
30) Dynamic Drive
31) ExtJS Blog -A Incredible JavaScript-Framework with numerous modules and components such as tables, trees, windows, layouts, forms, and tabs.
Social Bookmarking
32) del.icio.us
33) Dzone
34) Stumbleupon
35) Digg
Images Manipulation
36) Vector Magic - the online tool for precision bitmap to vector conversion
Miscellaneous Stand Outs
37) Tech Crunch
38) Lifehacker - the Productivity and Software Guide.
39) Zen Habits
41) The FWA
42) Kirupa