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

Spiffy

[generic-man]

The examples look very nice. I still think the bigger problem is that web applications have absolutely no UI consistency between them, though. On one web site, select-boxes cause a form to be immediately submitted when a selection is made; on others, you have to click "Go." On one web site, check boxes look like boxes with check marks; on another they look like stars; on another they look like glowing orbs (not very colorblind-friendly).

This is the sort of thinking that leads to such UI atrocities as Winamp, iTunes for Windows, and Firefox for Mac OS X: all three of these ignore most of the native widget drawing capability in the name of creating a pointlessly slick, cross-OS-consistent experience.

I for one welcome the arrival of XAML and XUL: ways to describe forms that every OS will render using its own navigation and widget capabilities. It'll be as awesome as the time Java solved that problem for everyone everywhere.