As you may already know, HTML5 has introduced a number of new input types, one of which is the “number” type. As you might expect, this is a form field which accepts numeric input. So what happens in Chrome with the following HTML when we try to enter a decimal (floating point) number and submit the form?

<input type="number" />

Answer: Chrome pops up a validation error:

So what’s going on here? Is it a bug? It doesn’t fail in Firefox.

Well actually it’s not a bug; the form field is behaving as defined by the W3C. Numeric input fields can take additional attributes “min” and “step”, which constrain the range of values allowed in your input. The “min” attribute is fairly obvious: it’s the minimum value your number can be. The “step” attribute is less intuitive: by playing with different values, you would most likely work out that it controls the increase/decrease when clicking the up/down buttons on the field. If you input the number 1 and click the up arrow, it will increase to 2. This is because the default step is 1. So far, so obvious. However, the step attribute also determines which values are valid, so a step of 1 means you can enter 1, 2, 3 etc. and a step of 2 means you can enter 2, 4, 6 etc, and when you click the up/down buttons the number will increase/decrease by 2 each time, but entering 3 or 5 in the box will cause a validation error. You can also use a decimal value: for example, a step of 0.3 will allow values such as 0.3, 0.6, 0.9 etc, but not 1 or 2.

But what if you want all the numbers to be valid, integers and decimals alike? In this case, set step to “any”:

<input type="number" step="any" />

Now you don’t get a validation error. Yay! Also note that if you only want to accept positive numbers, you’ll want to add min=”0″.

So the lesson here is that the “step” attribute is linked to both the up/down buttons and the range of values allowed in the field. When step=”any”, the up/down buttons will increase/decrease the number by 1. As far as I can tell, there is no way to have step=”any” and an increase/decrease of more (or less) than 1 when clicking the up/down buttons. Feel free to enlighten me in the comments though!

About us: Isotoma is a bespoke software development company based in York and London specialising in web apps, mobile apps and product design. If you’d like to know more you can review our work or get in touch.