The Past, Present, and Future of the Form Tag

In our kickoff episode of Just a Spec, we take a look back at the early use of forms on the web to facilitate messaging and payments, the introduction of XMLHttpRequest which started the Ajax revolution, how JSON-based API calls began to veer away from the spirit of progressive enhancement, modern page update techniques which still take advantage of form mechanics and HTML transport, and promising new specs like FormData and ElementInternals which propel "vanilla" form technology into the future.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 6:44 The History of <form>, Ajax, and Beyond
• 10:08 Guestbooks, remember those? ;-P
• 12:50 Payments over plain text ?!?!
• 14:16 And then there was XMLHTTPRequest aka AJAX
• 17:45 Now everything's coming up…JSON?
• 20:11 Sure, just blame all the backend devs… ;-P
• 21:17 Back to saner defaults?
• 25:04 React Server Components are HTML! …until they're not…
• 27:03 Better <form>s with FormData and Element Internals
• 35:35 Eagerly awaiting browser parity on cool new APIs
• 37:13 Web development…is forms!
• 39:18 Sticking close to true form submissions and HTML
• 45:34 Outro