Idea for improved Checkbox and Radio Buttons (call for discussion)

In most GUI frameworks, checkbox and radio button *include* the labeling
text so you have a larger target for selection.  However, with HTML
you must select the (usually) tiny box to effect the change.

One solution would have been to define <INPUT> as a container
but it's obviously too late for that.

So it would seem that we need some way of grouping label text along
with the input field such as:

    <ENCLOSE>
    <INPUT TYPE="checkbox" NAME="box1" VALUE="Selected"> BOX #1
    </ENCLOSE>

Such that selecting ``BOX #1'' would activate the checkbox.

There is a colision with the function of <A HREF=""> inside the
enclosing tags (does the selection then activate the anchor or
the checkbox) so that would need to be resolved (though it's
probably more a function of the user interface than the
markup spec).

It would also be upto the browser authors to define the visual effects,
if any, of this tag and style-sheets would probably want to be able
to specify sunken/raised attributes, etc (hopefully in a portable way).

Received on Wednesday, 10 September 1997 15:53:59 UTC