I'm working on a Web-GUI for a semantic search with a single text-input as a search-box. Typical queries are: "buildings higher than 100 meters".
I want to format the input text as the server answers the question. The entities and operators should be colored to make it easier for the user to see what the computer understood.
Example:
I found thousands of hacks out there to accomplish this, but all of them were really awkward to some degree. I still want it to feel like a text-field. I want the user to be able to move the cursor by clicking and using the key-arrows. While querying the server, the text should of course be black only. The coloring comes from the servers interpretation and ususally is available "as-you-type" (few milliseconds answer-time).
I want this thread to be a discussion of the different possibilities of accomplishing this task and find the best general-purpose solution for everybody.
Perhaps a possible solution would be for you to use an editable div, like below:
<div contentEditable="true">
Lorem <b>ipsum</b> dolor
</div>
This way you can able to style user input as user type in (may be on keyUp event). While you submit this value in a form, you'll have to use JavaScript to get the innerHTML of this div and assign it to a hidden input or something.
Related
I have a problem where I need to change the displayed text between two different writing styles and wanted to ask if such a thing is even possible in HTML.
so like I my head I'm thinking about putting the text as a variable and saying
if output = 1:
display simple_text:
else display complex_text:
Here, the complex and simple text would be the variables the text needed to change is set to.
Thanks in advance for answering and reading my question
HTML is a markup language intended to describe the structure of a document in a both machine- and human-readable way.
As such, HTML doesn't have any logic like if...else or loops.
So to do what you want you will either need a template engine (which would decide at serve-time which text would be displayed, on the server), or Javascript, to implement the logic on the client-side (browser). Note that Javascript can be used on the server as well if the server runs Node.js.
To decide which one to go for, here's some cornerstones:
If the decision which text to display must only be made once - and won't change after that, going for a template engine on the server-side is probably the best approach.
If what is to displayed depends on some actions the user can perform (like you mentioned, clicking a button), go for a Javascript-based approach in the browser.
Excuse me for the maybe very stupid question, but my curiosity is killing me, and plus I'm new to this, but are using labels important in your markup, and why?
i.e.
<label for="birthdate">Birthdate:</label>
<input type="text" id="birthdate" name="birthdate" />
Why must I label this input, why is it beneficial to the user, why is going to be beneficial for future use, or is it search engine optimization thing. That's what I really wanna know :)
It's important for a number of reasons:
Clicking the label focuses on the
text field, which is something a lot
of users expect.
It's helpful for the accessibility reasons.
How else is the user going to know which field is which? You could use
just text or a span or something, but
why would you?
It leads to a more semantic markup.
It helps for accessibility, e.g. screen-readers.
Also for things like checkboxes it allows the user to click on the label and not just the checkbox itself (Try it!).
It's important for accessibility, so blind people using screen readers can easily tell which text box is meant for which thing, since possibly otherwise their software cannot tell the purpose of the active text box from the page structure. Also, clicking on the label will focus the appropriate input control, which is convenient.
Future use:
In a case where the input html form is directly linked with database ( happens in frameworks)
so the input form variables directly represent database columns.
So, instead of showing database column names to the user in the form, we can show simplified names to the user using Labels.
I just wondered and wanted to gather together in one place all missing features of our beloved html form elements.
One example could be missing of horizontal scrollbar in a listbox. But I am sure there are a lot of features we would like to see in our form elements by default.
One missing feature per answer please.
Thank you.
Date/Time picker controls, rather than always trying to manipulate a textbox, selects, or some other controls to create them.
Hell, they miss so many features, I wouldn't know where to begin! But here goes:
(Missing in HTML 4, don't know about 5)
Full visual customizability (background colours, borders, and text colours) for all elements (including checkboxes, radio buttons, and select elements)
Native input validation (without needing JS) for text inputs: Numeric only, alphabetic characters only, regular expression
An open enumeration, a "SELECT you can type in" would be handy in some situations.
If pretty much everyone, but not quite, answers the question in one of ten or 15 different ways, you have to either force everyone to type in the answer or have an "other" option with a separate text field.
The lack of intrinsic support for multiple windows (or even just modal dialogs) is ridiculous.
Think of the tens of thousands of programmer-hours wasted on acrobatic manipulation of div elements just to implement a UI that would be trivially easy in a desktop app.
It's somewhat pointless to list what is missing in HTML 4 since so much has been fixed in HTML 5. And then, most of us can't list what is missing from HTML 5 because we are not familiar enough with it yet.
My application has a requirement such that I have to display a huge number of HTML input textfields (maybe 2,000 text fields). The fields can be logically grouped into sections and the sections are repetitive. What is the best way to display it to the user so that they can enter data with minimum clicks?
I'm not sure what kind of users you have that would willingly sit through 2,000 text fields, but if it's a requirement, then you do what you have to. :)
You say it can be grouped into sections and the sections are repetitive. I'm not sure what parts are repetitive, but managing the sections carefully seems of utmost importance. Some sort of Javascript hiding/showing seems likely to be a big help... I think I would choose JQuery's Accordion effect or something similar.
You could add Tab key events to each section in order to assist with navigation and open a new section once an old one was complete. Adding change events to the fields might assist with that as well.
If you need to break the form up across multiple pages, then you'll probably want to utilize AJAX to load new sections/pages and store the submitted data into a session until the user is done.
Depending on the format of the required answer, there are two ways:
If the answer is of a known length or the answer is one of a few choices, you may auto-advance the cursor w/some javascript/jquery. For instance, if you're expecting phone numbers, when the person enters the 10th digit in the box, move the cursor to the next box.
If you don't know and you can't apply (1), the quickest way is to encourage users to tab their way through the boxes.
Speaking of tabs, if the boxes can be logically grouped, you could create tabs and have the users page their way through the questions. This will create more clicks, but will improve user experience.
But holy crap, 2k text boxes on one page is crazy!
I work on a similar product, and perhaps the number one thing would be to make sure that tabbing between fields works logically and quickly. The people who do data entry on this type of thing are lightning fast and fairly mindless (I don't mean that in a pejorative sense), typing in numbers from a log or printout without looking at a screen.
Apart from that, we implement tabs (like tabbed browsing) on the page, group boxes, and other things like "dynamic lists" which is like a data grid of text boxes that the user can add and delete rows from client-side.
Paged format, like a survey? You could then use SESSION to store the input for each page and retrieve the prior answers when the user switch between them. Another method is to use ajax to navigate between different . I think the issue is not the number of clips, but 2000 textfields is going to look scary on just one single page.
I've got a bit of a usability issue that I'd value some input on.
The initial page to my site contains two groups of controls, one for users to login, the other for new users to activate.
The issue is with the latter. When users signup for the service, they recieve an activation code that's in the form XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX. At the moment they have to enter this into four separate textfields. Whilst I've added some javascript to this to automatically move them back and forwards between textfields as if it were a single control (which works pretty well) the issue is that it lacks a way for the user to paste their data into it and as such is a bit of a pain.
Now this is not a huge issue, but it potentially means that peoples very first experience with my site is a slightly frustrating one, having to hop backwards and forwards between the email containing their activation code and my page. That's obviously not optimal.
At this point you're probably thinking that the glaringly obvious answer would be to make the activation code entry into one single textfield. And you would be right, but I lose one very important thing if I do this: I lose the key visual differentiator between one form and the other, which automatically tells the user which is the form they need to use without reading anything or having to analyse anthing. As it is at the moment, effectively there are two different shaped holes on the page and the users data will obviously only fit one of them so, to an extent, it's a no-brainer which form is relevant to them.
So, does anyone have any good solutions to this? The single restriction is that I need to keep all controls on one single page.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Edit:
Thanks for all the input so far, every bit of which has been valuable. I'm currently thinking that the best solution is not one single thing, but actually an amalgamation of different approaches to make the whole thing more usable.
On that basis, here's what I'm going to do, based on all your suggestions:
In the purchase email, setup the link
to the initial page such that it
contains the activation code in the
querystring. Setup the initial page
to check this and forward them
straight on. This probably means that
the vast majority of users won't even
see the initial page, but there will
still be cases whereby people receive
their codes by other means and will
have to input them directly
Convert the four textfields to a
single textfield with
"XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX" as an inline
label.
Setup the login controls to forward
on any user that mistakenly enters
their activation code here without just dumping them to an error screen.
And I don't know why I didn't include it in the first place, but here's the URL for anyone that wants to take a look at the current implementation (you'll have to excuse the fact that it's in Italian, but it should be fairly straightforward what's what).
Have given the answer to bryan which contains most of what I'm going to use. If I had the necessary reputation I'd vote up all your answers as they've all helped. Thanks again.
A few easy options:
You can keep them the same physical page, just alter the querystring when you send the activation code. Hide one set of controls if the querystring is available. If you have to display both sections, then grey out one section based on the querystring information.
Change the control to have one textfield, but include "XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX" as the default text in the New User Activation. If the user clicks on the textbox, remove the text so they don't include the prompting text with their activation code. People will see the default text and gravitate towards it if they're expecting that pattern. People logging in will see the default text and block it out.
You could write an onpaste function in JavaScript which chops up the pasted string in to 4character blocks and them writes them to the appropriate textbox's via the dom.
Sounds to me you’ve a problem of users confusing two text boxes but then you’re making it worse by dividing one text box into four. For example, auto-tabbing through fields is bad usability -see comments and answers to “Moving a focus when the input text field reaches a max length.”
Assuming this isn’t a hypothetical problem and you’ve actually observed people use the wrong field, you need to find another solution for users confusing the fields:
Use terse field labels. Label the field “Activation Code” not “Enter your sixteen character dash-delimited activation code from the email we sent you when you signed up.” Text necessary for explaining where to get the activation code should be after the text box.
Use cueing text or graphic design on the outside of the text box to indicate it has four substrings. For example, put “XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX” under the text box.
Remove all extraneous elements from the page –the more graphic and text distractions on the page, the less the differences between the two text boxes will be noticed.
Make it so it doesn’t matter which text box the users use. If the string entered in the Username text box doesn’t match any username, then see if it matches any activation code, and vice versa.
Eliminate the activation code text box. Instead, when you send the activation request, include a sign-up URL that includes the activation code as a parameter (more details in answer by bryanjonker).
Sorry, this should probably be a comment, not an answer, but it wouldn’t fit.