Check Boxes and Radio Buttons Conquered by DHTML

Philip Howard writes "Pretty much every form element has been conquered by CSS so far, letting us create stylish, integrated forms to tie in closely with our site designs for that UI polish graphics artists love to have. Radio Buttons and Check Boxes, however, have resisted most attempts to style them consistently, accessibly and elegantly- perhaps because nobody cares enough to come up with the solution. However, these elusive form elements have finally been conquered with a simple combination of CSS and Javascript and a little HTML wrapper. The solution is easy and quick to implement, is accessible (working with tab and space) and elegantly degrades where CSS and/or XHTML is not available."

Comments

Re:Not really new, but interesting

[schon]

Web developers only need to cater to those devices in which they expect their content to be viewed.

Bullshit. Web developers need to be

I do not expect, nor do I desire for someone to use my company's web apps from a cellphone or PDA.

Then you're asking your company to be put out of business.

Would your boss like it if your store rejected people who drove up in something *other* than a Ford or GM car? The answer is (quite obviously) "NO". (Why does the car one drives have any bearing on how good their money is? Would you intentionally restrict your business to people who drive a car that you don't know about?)

Web pages are no different. You make them accessible to as many people as you can, because you don't want to alienate your customers.

Re:Not really new, but interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Web developers only need to cater to those devices in which they expect their content to be viewed. I do not expect, nor do I desire for someone to use my company's web apps from a cellphone or PDA.

Web developers who don't cater for blind users with screen readers, whether they expect or desire such users or not, are at risk of prosecution under anti-discrimination laws.

What you expect, and what you desire, are completely irrelevant. What is relevant is what is legally required. And that legal requirement is accessibility.

Care to link to one of your company's web apps? I'd like to sue your ass, mister, and if your app doesn't work with my screen reader, your ass is gonna BURN.

Re:Not really new, but interesting

[alienw]

Please STFU. I doubt you've ever made a single website or written a single line of javascript code. Otherwise, you would know that "standards-compliant" just means that it doesn't work correctly in any browser, since no browsers are 100% standards-compliant.

Re:Not really new, but interesting

[Brandybuck]

Why is it that amongst web developers there is only considered to be 'one way to do things'.

Maybe it's because they're not really developers? They like to pretend they are, but they're not. Writing javascript no more makes them developers than writing shell scripts would. And of course, HTML and CSS are *NOT* programming languages!

Real developers test their code. Web "developers" do not. At best they'll make sure their pages work with Internet Explorer and Firefox. As if those are the only two browsers in the world. Test on last years Firefox? Hah! Don't make me laugh!

The people working on the back end database and CGI interfaces might be developers, but those who write the HTML/CSS are not. Yes, there are some exception, but that only validates the rule.