14. Design Issues in Windowing Systems/Widgets
This chapter is about Control Tools (Control Widgets) used in selecting among alternatives, searching in the interface, controlling the actions. The common widgets are
- Buttons (action)
- Check Boxes (selecting)
- Radio Buttons (selcting)
- Sliders (Moving documents)
- Cursors (Different shapes for different actions)
- Dialogues (Collection of widgets)
In this chapter we take a look at some html-widgets and how they are used in html-documents
Tables
An easy way to partition the screen into areas is to use the table-tags.
The table can be configured as proportional with the window. Therefore it can accomodate to different screen sizes.
See for example HTMLPrimer for table construction.
Forms
For basic tricks see for example fill-out-forms/overview.html. This document contains several basic examples to be used in forms.
- Fields for data entry
- Check Boxes for inclusive selection - small number of alternatives ( say up to 5 )
- Radio Buttons for exclusive selection - small number of alternatives
- Pop-up menus (up to ten to twenty choices)
- Scroll menus (several choices - inclusive or exclusive)