We're trying to speed-up the web form process for our mobile users. One of the solutions is to have special fields bring up special keyboards.
for example:
<input type="text|email|tel|number|url" />
It's my understanding that the behavior of these input types are not constant across all devices. We're not relying on validation for these keyboards, we have our own, but we would like our users to conveniently flow through the form and have the appropriate keyboard ready.
What is the typical fallback behavior?
some try to use tel as a method of inputing numbers, but there are reports of some devices validating the number as input. Such as numbers starting with 0 may be sent as 2.
As front-end mobile developers, what would you recommend?
From the user's side, I would recommend you to use different keyboards to different fields because it would fasten the process and is very convenient to the user.
When you are asking the users to enter their phone number's, why do you want to show him letters and symbols. don't you think that's unnecessary. So it's better to show a keyboard that only has numbers.
By default you will get the letters keyboard and now you are asking the user a click to go numbers & symbols. Its always better to reduce the clicks and time.