iPhone UIWebview: How to force a numeric keyboard? Is it possible?

It looks like Mobile Safari supports the new HTML5 input type attributes of email, number, search, tel, and url. These will switch the keyboard that is displayed. See the type attribute.

So for example, you could do this:

<input type="number" />

And when the input box has focus, the number keyboard is shown (as if the user had the full keyboard and hit the "123" button.

If you really only want numbers, you could specify:

<input type="tel" />

And then the user would get the phone number dialing keypad.

I know this works with Mobile Safari -- I only assume it will work with UIWebView.

I found a better solution is to use <input type="text" pattern="[0-9]*"> when designing forms for both mobile and desktop browsers.

From Apple's documentation (the note about UIWebView):

You cannot specify the keyboard type in input elements. The web view displays a custom keyboard that is based on the default keyboard but includes some additional controls for navigating between form elements.

Checked on IPhone OS 3.0, this functionality was still not there, not sure why Apple just removed this handy functionality, really upset to work on this right now :(