On Sat, 2007-05-12 at 22:14 +1200, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: > I wonder if it would be useful to give toggle buttons a shape > analogous > to the controls they represent. Boolean toggle buttons could be > rectangular [___][___][___], because checkboxes are square. And > groups > of radio toggle buttons could have the first and last rounded > (___|___|___), because radio buttons are rounded. The radio button proposal looks very similar to MacOS 10.4's tab replacement. I confess if like it. > I speculated about this in <http://urlx.org/lists.whatwg.org/0d1e4>: > "[N]ative checkbox and radiobutton labels are clickable but don't > look > like it. My guess is that their clickability was added as a quick > hack > in the early 1980s, once testing revealed that the checkboxes and > radiobuttons themselves were uncomfortably small target areas. The I think you are right. I've sat in a number of usability studies, and users read the meaning and click what they read. Many users don't understand the metaphor. I'm tired of explain why they are called radio buttons. > designers should have established a different appearance to advertise > this different behavior, but they didn't. Perhaps they could have > used > a contiguous groove or ridge underlining both the checkmark/dot and > the > label, with no separate border around the checkmark/dot artificially > belittling the target area. The next time Microsoft or Apple or > Trolltech or Symbian or the GTK+ developers alter their toolkit's > default appearance, that is something they could experiment with." I think I'd like to see an example of this before saying this is a good idea. UI's have been striping cruft like borders because they compete with the focus of the controls. Whitespace can be better than adding borders, braking complex layout in to several simple layouts can be better than adding white space. But to your point. Since the metaphor doesn't always work, nor the target the ideal size, we do need a better control. -- __C U R T I S C. H O V E Y_______ Guilty of stealing everything I am.
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