Re: [Usability] Gnome HIG suggestion: search box clear buttons

[Matt Fellows <matt fellows onegeek com au>]

On Sun, 2007-06-03 at 14:15 -0700, Kirk Bridger wrote:
>  I think Firefox used to do the pre-select in the URL field and I
> always found it difficult to use.  Or is it IE that currently does
> this?

FYI Firefox and IE on Windows automatically select the text on first
click, the latest version of Firefox and Opera on Linux lets you click
wherever you want.

>From what i can tell just by clicking in every possible text box, this
is standard behaviour in Gnome (anyone who knows better feel free to
shut me down on this one). This fact alone would be a compelling reason
to have a clear button, or at the very least to not automatically select
text with one click.

I'm not sure if using colours as an indicator of search state would
suffice, especially for those with vision impairments. Red and green are
probably the most recognised colors in terms of meaning (bad/no/error vs
good/yes/success) but obviously can't be used. Any other pairing of
colors would be arbitrary. There needs to be redundancy in another
mechanism to provide a sense of search state. That will have to wait for
another email however as right not I'm stumped for something clean and
simple.

Cheers,

-- Matt