The datalist element on iOS 26

The datalist element is all fucked up on iOS. Again.

I haven’t “upgraded” my iPhone to iOS 26 and I have no plans to. The whole Liquid Glass thing is literally offputting. So I wouldn’t have known about the latest regression in Safari if a friend hadn’t texted me about the problem.

He was trying to do a search on The Session. He was looking for the tune, The Road To Town. He started typing this into the form on the home page of the site. He got as far as “The Road To”. That’s when the entire input was obscured by a suggestion from the associated datalist.

This is incredibly annoying and seems to be a pattern of behaviour for Safari. Features are supported …technically. But the implementation is so buggy as to be unusable.

I’ll probably have to do some user-agent sniffing, which I hate. And it won’t be enough to just sniff for Safari on iOS 26. Remember that every browser on iOS is just Webkit in a trenchcoat.

Time to file a bug and then wait God knows how long for an update to get rolled out.

Update: I filed a bug, but in the meantime it looks like user-agent sniffing is going to be impossible.

datalist experiment

This is wonderful stuff! I’m a big fan of the datalist element but I hadn’t realised how it could be combined with input types like range and date.

So nifty!

SCALABLE: Save form data to localStorage and auto-complete on refresh

When I was in Amsterdam I was really impressed with the code that Rose was writing and I encouraged her to share it. Here it is: drop this script into a web page with a form to have its values automatically saved into local storage (and automatically loaded into the form if something goes wrong before the form is submitted).

Bring Focus to the First Form Field with an Error :: Aaron Gustafson

A handy little script from Aaron to improve the form validation experience.

The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake? | WIRED

Paul Ford:

The web was born to distribute information on computers, but the technology industry can never leave well enough alone. It needs to make everything into software. To the point that your internet browser is basically no longer a magical book of links but a virtual machine that can simulate a full-fledged computer.

How To Build Resilient JavaScript UIs — Smashing Magazine

The opening paragraphs of this article should be a mantra recited by every web developer before they begin their working day:

Things on the web can break — the odds are stacked against us. Lots can go wrong: a network request fails, a third-party library breaks, a JavaScript feature is unsupported (assuming JavaScript is even available), a CDN goes down, a user behaves unexpectedly (they double-click a submit button), the list goes on.

Fortunately, we as engineers can avoid, or at least mitigate the impact of breakages in the web apps we build. This however requires a conscious effort and mindset shift towards thinking about unhappy scenarios just as much as happy ones.

I love, love, love the emphasis on reducing assumptions:

Taking a more defensive approach when writing code helps reduce programmer errors arising from making assumptions. Pessimism over optimism favours resilience.

Hell, yeah!

Accepting the fragility of the web is a necessary step towards building resilient systems. A more reliable user experience is synonymous with happy customers. Being equipped for the worst (proactive) is better than putting out fires (reactive) from a business, customer, and developer standpoint (less bugs!).