How to polyfill non-supporting browsers

All this HTML5 form malarkey is all well and good. There seems however, to be two things that put a serious dent in our ability to use them: disparity between how supporting browsers implement the features and how to deal with browsers that don't support the features at all. Thankfully, as ever, the web community has found a way.

Back in Chapter 4, HTML5 for Responsive Designs I mentioned Modernizr (http://www.modernizr.com), a fantastic JavaScript library that helps insert polyfills for browsers lacking the requisite HTML5/CSS3 features. "Webshims Lib", written by Alexander Farkas (http://afarkas.github.com/webshim/demos/) is built on top of this and the ubiquitous jQuery library to only load the form polyfills (it can handle poly-filling of other HTML5 features too) needed to make non-supporting browsers handle our HTML5 forms. What's particularly great is the fact that as it utilizes Modernizr's loading capabilities, the relevant polyfills are only...