[thelist] Form CSS styles

[Andrew Clover]

> from a "give the developer as much control as possible" viewpoint and
> not a "what's security?" viewpoint right?

Both really. I've grown really tired of MS's approach - especially in the
area of IE - of blindly adding hundreds of features of questionable
usefulness, and integrating everything with everything else such that
any small bug is likely to become a security hole. From my personal
experience, MS Security seem far more interested in arguing Mitigating
Factors and denying potential issues than good practice.

Which is why I find it very strange that they've taken control away from
the developer on this small, very specific issue, where to all intents
and purposes there is no security problem.

BTW whilst we're on the subject of <input type="file"> and security, I'd
advise Netscape 6.0 and 6.01 users (and Mozilla up to, er, 0.9.3 I think)
to upgrade their browsers pretty sharpish. It's not just MS who have
problems you know...

>  - ctrl+mouse click will select more than one "option"
>    when in multi-select mode

Argh! <select multiple>! What do you want, blood! :-)

>  - pressing "o" key three times shows me the third
>    "option" that starts with the letter "o".

Hmm, I'm not sure I like this behaviour. I'd expect it to try to select
an option starting with 'Ooo'. I know it annoys me when I go to a
'country' select box and try to type 'Ge...' for Germany and end up with
some country beginning with an 'E'. Instead you have to press 'G' and then
go down a few entries until you get to the right one - not brilliant for
usability.

>    http://members.evolt.org/jeff/code/select_keydown.cfm

D'oh - I see you're waaaay ahead of me Jeff :-)

BTW the Windows way of solving the "you can't remember what you've typed
in so far" problem you mention there is to timeout about a second after
typing, so if you press another key it starts a new 'word'. You can see
this in eg. the filer. It's not perfect (and I personally find the timeout a
little too fast) but it's a decent approach.

> additionally, it would be nice if it supported icons for each "option".

Mmm yes. That'd be smart. You could have little flag icons in your country
menus and everything.

> finally, it started out as a normal <select> which was replaced with the
> dhtml version for those browsers that would support it (make sense?).

Yes, agree 100%. (This is what the file-styler script did.) A solution
that breaks the form for people without JavaScript is no solution at all
IMO. Scripts should augment the functionality of a web site, not recklessly
break its accessibility.

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://and.doxdesk.com/