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

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Tab Atkins Jr.<jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Jim Jewett<jimjjewett@gmail.com> wrote:

>> 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. ...

> Is the author still giving a max/min, and the
> <meter> merely displaying differently
> above/below those levels?

That was my intent; the justification wasn't so
much to emphasize the outliers as to avoid
scrunching the normal case into illegibility.

But I prefer your next suggestion, so long as it
doesn't cause problems compared to the case
where min and low (or max and high) are both
supplied:

> A potential solution: if max and min aren't
> supplied, but low and high are, then the
> low/high regions extend to +-inf.  When the
> value is within those regions the <meter>
> doesn't display as a deterministic
> percentage, but as a special indicator of
> overflow/underflow.

>>>> 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?

> The way I expect normal <meter> styling
> to work is the author providing two
> images/colors, one for the whole bar and
> one for just the filled portion of the bar.

That makes sense, if meter is just a single value
(normally) within a single range.  I was thinking
that meter was designed to show more categories,
something like the following.

min=0
low=1.5
normal=2.75
optimal=3.25
high=3.75
max=5  (unsafe, but possible)

Quarts oil:
m...1.L.2..N3O.H4...M
0...1...2.V.3...4...5

To make that prettier, you would need 5 categories (pictures/colors)
as well as a marker for the current value.

And that led to the question of whether those were exactly the right 5
categories, or maybe we should let users define their own intervals.

-jJ

Received on Wednesday, 2 September 2009 20:50:19 UTC