Re: A new one: label vs. Scope

Charles McCathieNevile at charles@w3.org wrote:

> It is unfortunate that HTML doesn't offer a way of assigning multiple
> form fields to a single label (and vice versa).
> 
> It does. Fieldset/legend assign one label to multiple controls:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/forms.html#edef-FIELDSET

These are two different things. Fieldset/legend are for logical groupings of
form elements at a more macro level. If I have a section denoted by a
fieldset with a legend of "Personal Information" I may have 10 form elements
within it (First name, last name, street, city, state, zip, etc.) Within all
of that I may have a phone number label with three elements after it for the
three parts of the phone number. Fieldset/legend would not make sense here.
Rather, a different construct which lets me use one label for all three
elements (or rather, three labels which explain the three parts for people
who need it leaving it at one label and three fields for people who don't).

Fieldset, to my way of thinking, is a larger level construct which won't
solve the problems we've been discussing here the last few days.

As for assigning multiple labels to a single element, I don't see why anyone
would want to do that. Can anyone think of a situation? It seems to me that
you'd just make the single label more descriptive to cover it adequately.

-A

Received on Tuesday, 23 April 2002 13:55:42 UTC