Author Archives: Oren

Radio Buttons: a bad design?

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Just a thought: once a user clicks on some radio button, it'll be selected, but the user will have no standard way to remove/undo this selection. The only possibility is to switch to another radio button on the same radio button group. As far as I know*, this behavior occurs on all popular GUIs, including web, windows forms, qt and gtk, and probably others.

It's been like that for so many years, isn't it time to add a "deselect radio button" standard? Just like a checkbox, a single click would be a simple enough way to undo a selection. For special cases, a "ForceSelection" property may indicate that this radio button group cannot be deselected, to preserve the current behavior.

* I merely researched this topic, it's a just-a-thought kind of post and might be inaccurate.

HTML "name" attribute, Firefox misbehaves

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It's been a long time since I wrote something about web-dev, that's because I code less web-stuff recently 🙂

"id" vs. "name" attributes

so far, I thought that "id" should be used for unique IDs, and "name" can be used for non-unique names, i.e. multiple HTML tags with the same name. I've been using document.getElementsByName(str) to get an array of elements with the same name.

Today I've figured out that it's only partially legal: the name attribute can be used only for specific elements (such as INPUT), but cannot be used on many elements (such as DIV). For some reason, Firefox accepts the name tag for any HTML element, while IE follows HTML 4.01 and doesn't accept name tags for "illegal" HTML tags.

Proof of concept

The next piece of JS/HTML code, gives different results on both browsers:

<div name="foo">bla</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
alert(document.getElementsByName("foo").length)
</script>

Results:

  • Firefox 3: 1
  • IE 7: 0

Here is a nice explanation with a full list of "name"-allowed HTML tags.

Israeli-web critique project

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Hi,

I've been writing about it two months ago, and at last I did it: a new blog (hebrew only) aiming at making the big Israeli web sites better (from technical point of view), by posting positive critics about current websites.

I invite you to:

  • Subscribe by RSS, to get the updates (and write talkbacks! 🙂 )
  • Give ideas for new articles (webwatchisrael at gmail.com)
  • Write new articles yourselves and send us (according to the guidelines)

Check out the first posts there..