Re: [Usability] label alignments

[Sinzui Kobalt <sinzui cox rr com>]

The left aligned verses right aligned labels highlights a weakness in
how we create forms--how do we strongly bind a label to a control?  I
don't think there is a right way, and we may want to accept this for now
and look for a long term fix for the interface. 

Developing forms for the Web offers a few more options that might be
incorporated in Gnome.  A left aligned field can be bound to a control
by using a background color--not very theme-friendly though.  Borders,
and rules can also help the eye find the control that the label belongs
to.  HTML 4 introduced the label element to bind text to a control for
keyboard navigation, but I'm not aware of any browser that renders this
relationship visibly. I'm sure with some planning, the label and control
could highlight when the mouse hovers over one of them. 

The xforms working draft at the w3
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-xforms-20011207/) offers a lot of good
ideas that are applicable to OSes, particularly in distributed
environments like Gnome.  It offers good semantic for constructing and
controling forms, but has only a few ideas about how they should be
visually rendered.  What is particularly nice about the mechanism is
that it is self-validating and can be dynamically generated. 
Incorporating key xform functionality could simply, if not revolutionize
how user input is collected.  

I believe I saw a novel suggestion a few month back where an app could
publish its form requirements in xml, have it processed for glade, then
render it in realtime using libglade.  If I recall rightly, it
incorporated some notions of validation too.  In general, the mechanism
removed the programmer from rendering/visualizing the form, let the user
select how they wish to view and interact with forms.  I wish I could
remember which Gnome list I saw this on.

-- 

__S i n z u i___________________________________
sinzui cox rr com
Guilty of stealing everything I am.
-- 

__S i n z u i___________________________________
sinzui cox rr com
Guilty of stealing everything I am.