

RE: radio button & drop-down

From: Geoff Deering <gdeering@acslink.net.au>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 11:43:12 +1100
To: "Derek Featherstone" <feather@wats.ca>, <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Message-ID: <NBBBJPNFCLNLAADCLFJBCEOBFCAA.gdeering@acslink.net.au>

You can really do some nice things with design and layout with FIELDSET and
CSS, you can make complex forms appear nicely grouped and elegant (and
really funky, if that's what your project manager wants... I know that was
the main criteria of one project manager I worked for:-)))


-----Original Message-----
From: Derek Featherstone

Geoff wrote:
> But if you are mixing table cells across controls, as your example shows,
> when using fieldset you won't get a valid document (from memory).  Also
> fieldset can cause problems when using EMCA/Javascript on form controls in
> certain user agents (well, I shouldn't say fieldset is causing the
> it's the user agent's buggy implementation of those specifications).

Hmmm... Of course, forgot about those tables for form layout in the example

You might try to:

1. Use CSS with careful use of floats and widths for formatting the form
controls contained within the fieldsets, with appropriate amount of testing,


2. Use a table inside each fieldset with CSS to format the table cell widths
accordingly, so that you'd achieve the appearance of having all the same
table, with labels lined up and form controls lined up as in your example.

Now -- I'm not a big fan of using tables for layout, however, there are some
times when it is just easier to do so -- provided the rest of your markup is
solid and carries the logical structure, and the tables linearlize
correctly, I can't think of many accessibility problems this will cause...
JAWS will likely announce that there is a table there with 2 columns and 1
row, but I believe that should be relatively harmless.

Received on Tuesday, 28 October 2003 19:43:28 GMT
