Fancy Form Design
Another SitePoint book with a relatively narrow focus. This book deals specifically with the CSS and JavaScript that you might use to define how you want a form to look and behave.
My Rating: 
Pros
- Reuses the same several significant examples throughout the book
- Covers all aspects of form design from initial planning through CSS styleing and JavaScript behaviour.
- Demonstrates clearly which form fields can be styled with CSS and which require JavaScript in order to change them.
- Considers accessibility and useability.
Cons
- The explanation of the difference between submitting the form using GET and using POST doesn't properly explain what each is for.
- Relies on jQuery for the JavaScript solutions.
Description
- First Edition: October 2009
- 151 page paperback
- Published by Sitepoint
- ISBN: 978-0-9805768-4-9
- Create sensational web forms that sparkle
- Authors Jina Bolton, Tim Connell and Derek Featherstone
Review
A rather small book with a very narrow focus this book deals specifically with how to make your form fields look and behave in a much fancier way than you get with the regular HTML form fields. Changing the appearance of form fields is actually one of the more complex aspects of CSS and for some fields you even need to use JavaScript to be able to get the form field to look and behave how you want.
This book goes into a reasonable level of detail on just what all the issues with cross browser styling of the various form fields are and how to overcome them. If making your forms look really fancy is what you are trying to achieve then this book will help you achieve it. Several of the JavaScript solutions it demonstrates preempt some of the new form fields proposed for HTML 5 so that you will eventually be able to replace the JavaScript with HTML.
Whether this book is worth getting depends on just how fancy you want to make the forms on your site. If you are happy to let the form fields look the way that the various browsers use by default then you don't need this book but if you want to make the fields take on a more standardised appearance that better bends into your site then the examples in this book should show you just what you need to do.
More Information from the Publisher
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