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

[hacker]

"There is nothing more annoying than browsing to a site from a machine which doesn't have flash installed (don't want it) and realizing the site was written in such a way as to not be able to get past the into animation without flash."

I'll give you some more fuel to pour on that fire:

1. Can't change contrast (for those who might be colorblind and can't see light grey text on a white background. Who taught these kids color theory anyway? Barney the dinosaur?)
2. Can't change font size (whaddya mean you can't see my 6 point fonts, what are you, blind?)
3. No ability to search the text of a flash page using standard browser "Find" functions (yes, some search engines can index Flash now, with the proper hooks into the Macromedia Flash SDK, but its not exposed on the user end)
4. No fallback for non-Flash browsers, built into the Flash itself

It irritates me too, so I just don't use it, or recommend sites that do. Let's just make our entire site in PostScript, or better yet an OpenOffice.org .sxw or an OpenDocument .odp file format.

"Why not? You don't have the right plugin? Oh, too bad... get with the times!"

</sarcasm>

"People who make web-sites which can't be operated without flash need beatings."

People just need beatings anyway, just to let them know they can be beaten by anyone for any reason. This whole "Gimme" generation and the new business model of "Don't have a viable business plan? Sue someone! Profit!" needs to stop.

I'm going to have to start a new campaign called "Slap the Stupid out of Everyone" that does just that. Can't count change in the drive-thru? Find a new job, you're fired. Can't figure out how to answer questions about your product in the store? You're fired. Parking like an idiot? Towed.

I'm tired of just ignoring and tolerating stupidity and ineptitude and excuses. It has to stop.

Re:Fucking graphic design majors

[RosenSama]

I don't agree with this in two different ways.

#1 "new and better are mutually exclusive"
You are saying there is no way to improve UI. If new (change) is mutually exclusive with better than then only thing left is old (unchanged). Without change, there's no way to get better leaving a permanent status quo. By adhering to these arguments we'd still have rotary phones, analog clocks, and the command line.

#2 They didn't introduce a new UI element, they just learned how to make existing ones match the page.