Form fields are designed to collect information from visitors of a certain page. But despite the best efforts and explanations, getting the correct information from an average user can be difficult. Impatient or careless visitors may miss important fields, only partially fill one or several fields, or simply press the wrong keys. After filling the form this way they click "Send" button. The server program receives a set of data and if data validation is not implemented on the server side, the server program has no idea what to do with it.

A professional web page requires data validation, i.e. a method for detecting errors in the input data, or even better - a way to avoid mistakes in the first place. Over the years, web developers have been doing this using JavaScript procedures of their own design or through professional JavaScript libraries. To be honest, these approaches gave excellent results.

CSS has hugely improved forms. Where once you had very rudimentary forms that looked plain and un-styled, CSS lets you style your form however you want and create rich and robust forms. Even a simple contact form can look slick and increase readability and user-friendliness – which means more visitors will fill it out and you’ll get more results based on that action.

Like with any web design, there’s no need for you to reinvent the wheel – use these CSS form templates, tools and services to speed up your CSS form creation. Whether grabbing code snippets, using these templates as design inspiration, or simply using them whole, the point isn’t ultimately to try build everything from scratch by yourself, but rather have the best-looking and, more importantly, most-effective website possible. One that increases your desired results through visitors using your CSS form.

Typically, this text is displayed with grey color, but let’s say we have a need to stylize the text using CSS.
While this can be done only in Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox, in Opera as yet there is no opportunity specify the styles, and IE doesn’t support it at all.

CSS3 brings to life countless new possibilities to make better web forms. In this article, I have compiled a list of the best 10 tutorials to make great forms using this new and amazing technology.

In this post, we're showcasing a collection of 7 Great jQuery Plugins to Enhance Your Form Elements, all plugins are free for you to download and come with detailed documetaion on how to use them.

HTML5 Forms specifications introduce some new input types, attributes and other awesome features. One of the transversal features is native browser-side form validation.
For Firefox 4, we tried to focus on that feature and ship it as complete as possible. All following features descriptions are available with Firefox 4 beta 7 except some which are going to be available in following betas (it's clearly specified when that's the case).

Do you remember your first form? The first time you realised you could send emails through your site, thanks to a hosted service like Bravenet (remember them?!).

Or perhaps you hacked together a cgi script or even some PHP. But when that first email arrived with the subject line ‘test’ you realised that your website had now become interactive. You could now not only interact with your users, but also tailor your site based on their input.