Re: tweaking meter [was: Re: <meter> and <progress> (was RE: Implementor feedback on new elements in HTML5)]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 11:19 AM, Tab Atkins Jr.<jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 9:38 AM, Jim Jewett<jimjjewett@gmail.com> wrote:

>> I think meter should be an appropriate element
>> for things like "number of posts" or "member
>> for X months". ... [but] there is no *hard* maximum

> ...  It doesn't seem to make sense
> to try and represent these as a meter - there's no
> way to represent this visually. (Exception: you can
> always define a mapping from [0,inf) to [0,100)

Right -- my thought is that instead of the author supplying (and the
UA trying to accomodate) a theoretical maximum, they should stop at
the normal maximum.

For example, any temperature more than 10 degrees outside of normal
would be represented (for visual-at-a-glance viewing) as "overfull" or
"underempty", with the percentage full ("-----           ")
representations saved for distinguishing between different "normal"
values.

>> Should meter have the ability to define multiple
>> category breaks, such as

>>    val < 0.5 ==> star0
>>    0.5 < val <1.5 ==> star1
>>    ...
>>   3.5 < val ==> star4

>> and to style based on the category?

> Use-case?

This lets the designer put up the picture of 3 stars as the visual
representation, while still using the <meter> or <measure> element.

That strikes me as at least a slight improvement on the best current
practice of
<img src="/imgs/3star.jpg" alt="3 stars of of 5">

Also note that the various min/low/normal/optimum/high/max attribute
combinations already do this to some extent, but hardcode a few
specific categories.

-jJ

Received on Wednesday, 2 September 2009 17:23:59 UTC