tjaard.nl

As seen on Bartelme’s Design weblog there is a new search feature in Apple’s Safari as of late. It utilizes a new element <input type="search">, which is a standard <input type="text"> disguised as a neat Safari search field. Validation be damned, it degrades to a normal input field on non-Safari browsers, so everyone is happy, right?

Not quite. I don’t mind the introduction of a non-standard element for the sake of innovation. But I doubt whether it will be of much use in practice. While having an advanced way to manage one’s searches is quite useful, it is quite a disappointment that it is limited to only one field. For google searches or search queries on weblogs that only utilize one field this is just fine. But there are many places like ebay, amazon and in general forums on which searches involve filling out multiple form elements. As these searches are generally more complex it’d be especially useful to be able to manage these searches as well. And the perfect element for this to be realized is <form>.

I am aware that using modifications of/enhancements to the <form> element won’t degrade as nicely as <input type="search"> does, because it either requires some parts of the <form> element itself to be visible in some way (evil) or an additional input element that displays the search controls, the latter of which seems the most elegant to me.

I agree that having this magnifying glass in a form is cool. But having the magnifying glass with previous searches in complex forms presented in a table or a comma delimited list to save time would be really cool ;) .

Just to be clear, I read about it and couldn’t test the feature myself. But the feature descriptions I came across seemed quite complete.