Which features do html form elements miss

Question

I just wondered and wanted to gather together in one place all missing features of our beloved html form elements.
One example could be missing of horizontal scrollbar in a listbox. But I am sure there are a lot of features we would like to see in our form elements by default.
One missing feature per answer please.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Hell, they miss so many features, I wouldn't know where to begin! But here goes:

(Missing in HTML 4, don't know about 5)

• Full visual customizability (background colours, borders, and text colours) for all elements (including checkboxes, radio buttons, and select elements)

• Native input validation (without needing JS) for text inputs: Numeric only, alphabetic characters only, regular expression

Answer 2

Date/Time picker controls, rather than always trying to manipulate a textbox, selects, or some other controls to create them.

Answer 3

An open enumeration, a "SELECT you can type in" would be handy in some situations.

If pretty much everyone, but not quite, answers the question in one of ten or 15 different ways, you have to either force everyone to type in the answer or have an "other" option with a separate text field.

Answer 4

The lack of intrinsic support for multiple windows (or even just modal dialogs) is ridiculous.

Think of the tens of thousands of programmer-hours wasted on acrobatic manipulation of div elements just to implement a UI that would be trivially easy in a desktop app.

Answer 5

It's somewhat pointless to list what is missing in HTML 4 since so much has been fixed in HTML 5. And then, most of us can't list what is missing from HTML 5 because we are not familiar enough with it yet.