[thelist] Usability: Form assistance

[Gary McPherson]

Greetings, all.

I'm having some musings on the best way to provide context-sensitive
help for users filling out a form, my current ideas being:

a) a pop-up window holding list of notes for all fields and using named
links to focus on appropiate comment
b) fixed "help" area being populated with appropiate comment when a
field receives focus
c) static notes alongside all fields requiring further clarification

Obviously option c) is the simplest and most elegant solution - the only
reason I'm considering alternatives is that I was contemplating the
effect that longer comments might have on the purity of the form layout
(i.e. large vertical whitespace between fields, especially at lower
resolutions)

Any ideas, guidelines, no-no's welcome.

Gary