Re: Radio and checkbox texts

David Dorward wrote:

> On 24 Apr 2008, at 12:34, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>> This is a very, very poor example, because
>
> ... it takes the suggested code from the previous post and re-
> implements it in HTML 4.01 without addressing any of the shortcomings
> of the design of the form

That's the common way to create very, very poor examples that make their 
way to specifications.

The following is from the "Introduction to forms" part of the HTML 4.01 
specification:

    <INPUT type="radio" name="sex" value="Male"> Male<BR>
    <INPUT type="radio" name="sex" value="Female"> Female<BR>

Thus, it lacks some of the flaws of your example, and on the other hand 
it has the odd feature of not using <label> markup for the radio 
buttons, even though the example has such markup for text input fields! 
And it doesn't try to group related fields, even though the 
specification defines an element just for the purpose.

> (which has little to do with the markup used
> to represent it).

Actually, some of the flaws I mentioned are stricly markup problems. But 
even if we only consider the other problems, my point was that when your 
purpose is just to present an example on some technical issue, you still 
shouldn't set a _bad_ example on everything else.

>> That's definitely an improvement. However, the large majority of
>> forms on existing web pages lacks such markup, so most users probably
>> haven't even noticed the feature.
>
> How would having new syntax to achieve the same goal solve that
> problem?

By making it essentially simpler and more natural to specify the 
association between labels and fields.

>> The "generic system" requires a new identifier to be invented for
>> each and every input field and two attributes to be written
>
> <label><input> text</label> would work equally well.

No it wouldn't, as I mentioned previously. It has more limited support. 
And regarding the _design_ of markup systems, it's illogical, since the 
input element is logically not part of its label.

Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Thursday, 24 April 2008 12:33:36 UTC