Re: form label

Brian <usenet3 (AT) julietremblay (DOT) com.invalid> wrote:

I'm wondering what the group thinks is the best way to display the
label> element.

I think the first question should be "why". That is, what do we try to
achieve by changing the element's appearance?

There are various things that <label> elements may do to help the user.
I _just_ learned that for a text field, you can click on the label, too,
in order to focus on the field! But I don't think that's a particularly
useful feature (though not harmful either).

More importantly, users may need to be helped to see the _association_
between labels and fields. But in the most common designs, the
association is pretty obvious anyway, since each line or row contains one
label and one field.

This leaves, in my opinion, the feature that you can toggle the setting
of a radio button or a checkbox by clicking on its label, as mentioned
elsewhere in the thread. This is something relevant especially to people
with motoric disabilities or motorically challenged situation (try
clicking on a ridiculously small radio button using a portable computer's
excuse for a surrogate for a mouse, while sitting in a moving bus).
And users may even expect, from other user interfaces, that clicking on
the label affects the setting.

For this, I think putting the radio button or the checkbox in a bordered
box together with its label, with a distinctive background color for the
box, makes the situation as clear as possible without being too explicit.
(You could always write some text on the page, explaining how people can
click on the labels, but this gets awkward, especially since you would
then mislead many people who use browsers where things don't work that
way.) There are some examples of this approach at
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/kbd.html

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> a écrit dans le message de
news:Xns955183176F404jkorpelacstutfi (AT) 193 (DOT) 229.0.31

I'm wondering what the group thinks is the best way to display the
label> element.

I think the first question should be "why". That is, what do we try to
achieve by changing the element's appearance?

There are various things that <label> elements may do to help the
user. I _just_ learned that for a text field, you can click on the
label, too, in order to focus on the field! But I don't think that's
a particularly useful feature (though not harmful either).

Yes it's useful !! Nowdays you've got pretty complex applications on the
web. For now, the vast majority of this complexity is in the back office web
pages... And sometimes you can find a lots of checkboxes ! So its very very
usefull then to be able to check them using the label, it's really time
saving : don't need to point exactly in the checbox...

This is very common in UI, but in a web context <label> is used for that
just since a little time. So users are not used to be able to check a
checkbox or a readio button clicking on its associated label... And you have
to show her/him that he can do it, otherwise she/he will continue to point
exactly to the form object. The best I can see now is to use the CSS cursor:
pointer for labels... Underlining labels is I think a bad solution : you
have to keep the underline form to their common uses (links and "important"
text)

Brian <usenet3 (AT) julietremblay (DOT) com.invalid> wrote:

I think J.Korpela was saying that <label> isn't really necessary for
input boxes and textareas.

Oh, I seem to manage to get misunderstood quite successfully. :-)

What I referred to was the particular effect that clicking on a label
focuses on an input box (or textarea). I cannot find it useful, though I
might miss something.

But using <label> is useful for other purposes, such as helping speech
browsers to associate labels with fields - and perhaps for styling
purposes as well.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/