Web Architecture Matt | 09 May 2007 09:53 am
Standardizing web forms
I think all web forms should look the same. What’s the goal of a web form? Its goal should be to collect information from the user. Whenever possible, we should get things to the point where users don’t need to think about what steps they need to take to perform a task. So why should we as architects, designers and developers ever attempt to reinvent the form. It would be great for us all to settle on a form library.
It looks like there’s a whole movement devoted to design standards like this, Microformats.
Specifically, I really like the direction of Uni-Form. The forms look fluid, error handling is clear and graceful, it’s clear what field you’re on. I love it.
I’m looking to use this library for all form development. Maybe this is worth building a CFC to extend the
on 28 May 2007 at 12:35 pm 1.Michael Long said …
I have two main issues with the uni-form sample given:
1) The design wants a single form field per line. This precludes standard conventions like city / state / zip and as such makes the form appear much longer to the user. Users don’t like long forms.
2) As styled, the every-field-is-the-same-length design may "look" more appealiing to some, but in doing so it stops giving useful hints to the user about the size of expected responses. (e.g. a very narrow "state" field reinforces the fact that we’d prefer the abbreviation and not the entire name)
CSS-based forms also have issues when used under older browsers (as do most things), which may be a problem depending upon your user base.
on 31 May 2007 at 12:35 pm 2.Dragan Babic said …
Hi guys, first of all thanks for taking interest in Uni-Form. Now to answer some of your questions:
@Michael Long:
1) The design doesn’t imply anything, although it is correct that it gets tricky when you need a complex form. Consider Uni-Form’s default units as something to get you started and that will make the work easier for you, but don’t let it set you any boundaries or limitations, you still need to use your creativity to achieve wanted results. As far as multiple inputs per line go, please check out this thread that deals with that exclusively http://dnevnikeklektika.com/uni-form/community/discussion/15/layout-tip-stack-your-fields-with-col/.
2) What you are talking about is the current default styling, and it is just a matter of preference in most cases. I usually deal with those issues (field lengths) by adding additional classes, or giving the control of the width of the field to the length attribute (or rows and cols in the case of textareas).
Cheers.