Library Web Chic

Web Forms - Tips, Tricks, and Transformations

I found this fabulous tutorial of web forms today. It is interesting how much library site's need to use web forms and how much web forms truly suck. First, there is the problem of getting the form to look the way you want. Second, there is the issue of getting people to read the directions and fill out the form properly. Finally, there is the issue of how you get the information from the form to you in a usable format.

Darlene Fichter gave a good presentation at Computer in Libraries this year entitled “Why Web Forms Stink and What You can Do about It“. In particular, she reccomends telling users what exactly the user filled out improperly, perserving the user's data so they don't have to re-type it if they make a mistake on the form and have to make corrections, providing users feedback when the form is submitted, and organizing forms logically. She also talked about the pitfalls with different form elements (checkboxes, textboxes, etc). This is fabulous. However, what wasn't included in this presentation was some nitty-gritty coding information about forms.

If you want this, check out Accessible, Stylish Form Layout. This really awesome article talks about some form elements and attributes that I had never heard of before such as fieldset and for. All of these are part of the XHTML specification, but support varies from browser to browser. However, this seems to be the way of the future. It also gives a great hands-on examples of how to use CSS to style and format your forms beautifully. Using this tutorial and Fichter's advice you should be able to make your library website forms shine.

If you are curious about the future of forms check out the XForms Tutorial which talks about the next generation of HTML forms. XForms use XML to create forms on the Web.