Re: place-holding characters in edit/text boxes

Patrick,

It is worth it under two circumstances:

1> if your audience needs it and:
2> if it is found that some of the technology sugnificantly in use today
either requires it or a sugnificanty number of its users require it.  I do
not know the answer to this, but I do know that there are many situations
where unfortunately, I do not know what edit field is associated with what
label and of course, if the site is developped propprly this should not
happen, but if the words phone number were in the phone field, that could
work.  As for people needing to delete large numbers of characters, most of
them can do this quite easily.  I would say from personal knowledge that it
should not be needed much but I have not the authority with which to speak
beyond that.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "P.H.Lauke" <P.H.Lauke@salford.ac.uk>
To: "wai-ig list" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2003 11:04 AM
Subject: RE: place-holding characters in edit/text boxes



> I can at least attest that a space would probably not help.
> In fact, what
> worked was explicit text that said, "Type your information here."

But again, that works on a technical level, but from a usability point
of view it's dreadful, as users have to delete the lengthy placeholder
text. Imagine a long form with 10-20 input fields, all with this
type of placeholder text.

Maybe this will make me sound discriminatory, but...is it worth
accommodating for what is obviously a bug in very old (>6 years ?)
technology at the detriment of usability for the majority of users ?

Or maybe I'm just being polemic...

Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Webmaster / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk

Received on Tuesday, 2 September 2003 11:52:46 UTC