No doubt you interact with at least one form on the Web every day. Whether you’re searching for content or logging in to your e-mail account or Facebook page, using online forms is one of the most common tasks performed on the Web. As designers and developers, creating forms has a certain monotony about it, particularly writing validation scripts for them. HTML5 introduces a number of new attributes, input types, and other elements for your markup toolkit. In this article we’ll be focussing on the new attributes with a future article looking at the new input types.

The clinic is busy as ever with more HTML5 ailments. This week, we’ll show you how (and whether) to store a <canvas> on the server, whether to use <progress> or <meter>, more on <header>, the placeholder attribute, and HTML5 minification.