Re: A new one: label vs. Scope

I don't see why not:

<fieldset><legend>Address information</legend>
  <fieldset><legend>Street Address</legend>
   <p><label>Street name and number <input type="text" name="foo" /></label>
  <!-- I know that some AT developers don't appear to have managed, by and
large, to implement the above code, but don't understand why not. Anyway, there is
still a small subset of code that is valid and useable today --></p>
   <p><label>City <input type="text" name="bar" /></label></p>
  </fieldset>
  <fieldset><legend>Phone Numbers</legend>

etc...

Particularly given the fact that you can't wrap a form control with a label
and expect some of the more common assistive technologies to understand it,
you can't do things like

  <label>Name: <input type="radio" name="foo" value="yesPlease" />
Required</label>

and until fieldset is well implemented (as Phill says, this means more than
just being ignored so the text is presented) it isn't clear what the scope of
a fieldset is (otherwise you could use them to mark out required elements,
too).

cheers

chaals

On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Andy J. W. Affleck wrote:

  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



-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI  fax: +33 4 92 38 78 22
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Thursday, 25 April 2002 09:26:20 UTC