HTML Mobile -forcing the soft keyboard to hide

For further readers/searchers:

As Rene Pot points out on this topic,

By adding the attribute readonly (or readonly="readonly") to the input field you should prevent anyone typing anything in it, but still be able to launch a click event on it.

With this method, you can avoid popping up the "soft" Keyboard and still launch click events / fill the input by any on-screen keyboard.

This solution also works fine with date-time-pickers which generally already implement controls.

Scott S's answer worked perfectly.

I was coding a web-based phone dialpad for mobile, and every time the user would press a number on the keypad (composed of td span elements in a table), the softkeyboard would pop up. I also wanted the user to not be able to tap into the input box of the number being dialed. This actually solved both problems in 1 shot. The following was used:

<input type="text" id="phone-number" onfocus="blur();" />

Since the soft keyboard is part of the OS, more often than not, you won't be able to hide it - also, on iOS, hiding the keyboard drops focus from the element.

However, if you use the onFocus attribute on the input, and then blur() the text input immediately, the keyboard will hide itself and the onFocus event can set a variable to define which text input was focused last.

Then alter your on-page keyboard to only alter the last-focused (check using the variable) text input, rather than simulating a key press.