A look at how Huffduffer-style forms might improve “conversion”.
Whatever. Let’s face it: it’s just quite nice when a form isn’t just your typical form (which this article makes a good point of mentioning):
Where the traditional sign up form is a regular, everyday brown cow, the mad lib form is a purple cow - a shiny object. We’re naturally easily distracted by, and drawn to, what’s new or out of the ordinary! Take advantage of that.
I concur completely with Luke’s assessment here. Most password-masking on the web is just security theatre. Displaying password inputs by default (but with an option to hide) should be the norm.
This looks like a handy way of enhancing forms to have input masks (Luke W. would approve). Right now it’s a jQuery plug-in but I’m sure someone as smart as you would be able to create a standalone version, right?
This looks like a nice progressive enhancement pattern: convert a select element into an auto-completing input element (a country selector in this case).
This abuse of the !important declaration in Firefox’s user-agent stylesheet was driving me crazy recently. Roger proposes a CSS patch, but this is really something that needs to be fixed in the browser.
A terrific overview by Richard of the variations in names around the world:
How do people’s names differ around the world, and what are the implications of those differences on the design of forms, ontologies, etc. for the Web?
A fascinating examination by Hixie of web technologies that may have technically been “better” than HTML, but still found themselves subsumed into the simpler, more straightforward, good ol’ hypertext markup language.
The follow-on comments are definitely worth a read too.