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butbut
Joined: Jan 10, 2005
# Posts: 19
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Posted: 2005-Feb-17 09:11
Hello world...
for a while now i'm looking for good form design.
Can someone tell me if it's possible to style checkboxes, radiobuttonlists, dropdown listobx etc. (think of border, bg color, font , arrow color....)
I realy would like to style all elements of them.
Can this be done by CSS or do i need the asp.net CSSClasses?
Please help me!
Thanx in advance
Koen
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g1smd
Staff
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10418
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Posted: 2005-Feb-17 14:35
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
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lizardz
Joined: Nov 12, 2004
# Posts: 1394
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Posted: 2005-Feb-17 22:15
You can style it all, it's not guaranteed it will look exactly the same on every browser though.
Best thing to do is try. CSS is CSS, no idea about the asp.net thing though it makes little sense since at some point you have to deliver css styled html to a browser, so you might as well write it and know what's really going on.
Just take a test page, add classes to the form elements, apply styles to those classes, then see how it looks. CSS is pretty empirical, trial and error will take you far.
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g1smd
Staff
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10418
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Posted: 2005-Feb-17 22:29
Run the pages through the HTML validator and the CSS validator to make sure there are no coding errors tripping things up though.
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lizardz
Joined: Nov 12, 2004
# Posts: 1394
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Posted: 2005-Feb-17 22:41
Validating definitely is a good idea, each browser treats errors differently, and it's not predictable. End each css line with a ; as a matter of good practice, including the last one:
.someclass {
font-size:12px;
color:#fff;
}
However, validating only takes you so far, each browser has different css bugs, which will trigger perfectly on valid code. Test on as many different browsers as you can get your hands on and you'll avoid a lot of headaches.
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g1smd
Staff
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10418
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Posted: 2005-Feb-17 23:03
Even perfect code could look different on different browsers; but less than perfect code will be a disaster in some.
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butbut
Joined: Jan 10, 2005
# Posts: 19
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Posted: 2005-Feb-18 08:48
Ok Thanx so far.
But are there examples that show the results.
When i give a checkbox a id or class with border width color etc.
nothing happens. The same for the dropdownmenu.
But on textboxes buttons etc it all works.
What are the differences. Where are actual results that i can see.
Koen
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butbut
Joined: Jan 10, 2005
# Posts: 19
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Posted: 2005-Feb-18 10:14
i was wondering if it's possible to style the scroll of a (asp.net) textbox element different from the scroll style for the overall page?
Koen
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Ron C
Joined: Jul 23, 1999
# Posts: 1468
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Posted: 2005-Feb-18 18:26
Form elements are essentially the same as paragraphs or divs, with only one very important difference -- unlike most things on the page, form elements are USED by someone. Form elements are designed to be interactive.
That has two repercussions for the designer.
First repercussion: Some browsers generate form elements at the OS level, some generate the elements in the browser's own code space, and some (probably most) use a mix, generating some in the OS and some in their own code. If a browser asks the operating system to create a dropdown, neither the browser nor ultimately you have much control over the appearance. CSS simply won't work well.
Second repercussion: Donald Norman coined the term perceived affordance to describe whether a user thinks an action is possible, and some have taken that concept unto themselves as a religion. Form elements have to always look the same, they reason, so that users will know how to use them. An example of this is OSX/Safari, which very purposefully ignores all CSS when applied to form elements.
The bottom line is that styling form elements is certainly possible, but you will NEVER get those styles to work across a wide browser base.
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Form elements, I think, are one of those things that simply have to be accepted. 
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lizardz
Joined: Nov 12, 2004
# Posts: 1394
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Posted: 2005-Feb-19 02:35
Ron C, I'm really glad you mentioned that point, I'd thought of it, but you said it much better than I would have. You can style the submit buttons as long as it's obvious, but even that I don't like, I think the point you raised about keeping the interactive elements familiar is advice that really needs to be heeded, users get overwhelmed by new things all the time, but what they need is familiarity, form elements are basically os window elements if I remember right, unless they are browser specific, like with Opera for example. The user shouldn't be asked to figure out your specific idea of what looks 'cool' or 'well designed', they should be busy filling that form out because they recognized it easily and then acted. Make it easy on the user, put the user ahead of the designer's ego and your site will do better.
However, one styling I'd recommend, just ran across this problem using a dark background light text gnome theme, is to explicitly style the background color and color of:
textarea
input
or at least have a default body/html styling for the background color and color, which will by the way also make your css validate with zero warnings, since those values cascade down to all elements that do not change those values, including input and textarea.
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