A new one: label vs. Scope

The developers here are pushing the envelope on forms and what I know so I
have another conundrum on the heels of my last one. But, this time, I think
I already know the answer and just want to check my thinking.

They need a few forms which are tables of data. There is an arbitrary number
of rows (determined at runtime by the system -- this is a dynamically
generated form).

The basis structure (in gorgous ascii) is something like this: (note the
last column is just a series of check boxes)



First name    Last name    SSN          birthdate    title     Reviewed?
[        ]    [       ]    [         ]  [       ]    [    ]    []
[        ]    [       ]    [         ]  [       ]    [    ]    []
[        ]    [       ]    [         ]  [       ]    [    ]    []
[        ]    [       ]    [         ]  [       ]    [    ]    []
[        ]    [       ]    [         ]  [       ]    [    ]    []
[        ]    [       ]    [         ]  [       ]    [    ]    []
[        ]    [       ]    [         ]  [       ]    [    ]    []
[        ]    [       ]    [         ]  [       ]    [    ]    []


Well, obviously, <label> isn't going to work as I only have one row at the
top to provide text for the label and an unknown number of entry boxes below
them. Also, there's no room to add the label text to the various cells and
it would look awful anyway.

So, what have suggested is the following:

1) Don't use the label tag at all. It simply won't work in this context.

2) make sure the top row is set up using TH tags and that each have
scope="col"

My understanding is that browser agents that do the right thing will then
read the row header before each cell achieving the same goal that the label
tag would achieve if it worked in this context.

Is this correct?

Alternately, we could use the title attribute in each form input instead if
that would be more compatible.

Thoughts?

Thanks

-A

-- 
Andy J. Williams Affleck
listaccount@raggedcastle.com
http://www.raggedcastle.com/andyjw/

"You can't depend upon your eyes if your imagination is out of focus"
                                             -- Mark Twain

Received on Monday, 22 April 2002 12:54:17 UTC