Hi Kevin, Nice example, top marks ;).
Sometimes these discussions can get a little abstract and one (real world) example can help make the discussion less murky. Geoff, I understand your pain with regard to traditional (print) designers and the often rocky transition to screen-based design. (Although there's also no guarantee that a developer is any more aware of interface semantics.) By way of confession, back in '97 I coded a form using radio buttons as found them more satisfying aesthetically than checkboxes. Hopefully education or general awareness means that up-and-coming web designer/developers have more of a community to draw on. I often think the root cause of many issues with website usability come down to the mock-it-up-in-Photoshop-then-hand-it-over-to-the-tech-people-to-be-built approach. Ideally there would be meaningful dialogue between the brand/visual and the interface/usability. >I actually used read only input fields recently for our online subject >selections. Compulsory subjects were pulled out of a database and displayed >as read only input fields, while other fields were normal <select> elements. > >Why not just display the compulsory subjects as plain text? Because then >there is a visual and cognitive dissonance between the two information sets >- they can seem unrelated, especially when you consider that high school >students rarely read a web form's accompanying text, no matter how >important. I think in this case the fact that the information was displayed >with as part of the form avoided that problem, while using the "readonly" >attribute and styling the input text a medium grey took care of the rest. Cheers, -- Andy Kirkwood | Creative Director Motive | web.design.integrity http://www.motive.co.nz ph: (04) 3 800 800 fx: (04) 970 9693 mob: 021 369 693 93 Rintoul St, Newtown PO Box 7150, Wellington South, New Zealand ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
