CSS :out-of-range

By  on  

One aspect of web development I've always loathed was working with forms. Form elements have been traditionally difficult to style due to OS and browser differences, and validation can be a nightmare. Luckily the native HTML APIs added methods for improving the form validation situation.

With input[type=number] elements, you can add min and max attributes. Those attributes are great but the browser doesn't display distinct error styles if those numbers are out of range. Luckily we have :out-of-range:

/* matches when number is not within min and max */
input[type=number]:out-of-range {
  border-color: red;
}

Thanks to CSS :out-of-range, developers can style input elements based on its valid value status. Despite the HTML validation and styling, you must still do server side validation; honestly, you probably also want to do JavaScript validation here too.

Recent Features

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Use Custom Missing Image Graphics Using MooTools

    Missing images on your website can make you or your business look completely amateur. Unfortunately sometimes an image gets deleted or corrupted without your knowledge. You'd agree with me that IE's default "red x" icon looks awful, so why not use your own missing image graphic? The MooTools JavaScript Note that...

  • By
    Scroll IFRAMEs on iOS

    For the longest time, developers were frustrated by elements with overflow not being scrollable within the page of iOS Safari.  For my blog it was particularly frustrating because I display my demos in sandboxed IFRAMEs on top of the article itself, so as to not affect my site's...

Discussion

  1. Chad

    What would be a use-case for this rather than using :invalid ?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!