Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
We used to have a system where we had just a row of checkboxes, and as soon as you had clicked two, it would load the diff, without requiring you to click a button. I wonder why we didn't keep that? I preferred that. Then again, it is conceivable that it might not have worked in older browsers, or some people might have thought it was unintuitive?
As one of the people who was far from happy with that previous system, I will outline some of the things that were wrong with it: * it was possible to select more than two articles if a) you were quick enough or b) you clicked the browser's back button * it was impossible to use in any browser that did not have JavaScript enabled (including old ones, text-based ones, ones belonging to the security paranoid, etc) * a self-submitting form gives you no chance to change your mind, or even work out what the boxes mean, before it starts processing your "selection" * check-boxes don't normally work like that, so people won't be expecting that to happen [OK, so this point's more subjective than the others]
The current system uses a far more standard set of UI elements - a set of radio buttons is defined as only having one selected at a time, and people are used to that behaviour. So to select two of them, you have two columns - easy! When somebody [Gabriel?] made a working implementation of this, they added a bit of interface sugar where you don't see both columns of radio buttons at the same time - but it's not actually essential to the working of the interface, thus giving the smooth degradation without JavaScript that the previous implementation lacked.
In other words, the "evilness" is just somebody's idea of how to make the solution *look* nicer. Functionally, it is the same as, say, UseMod's equivalent [1], and the looks would be almost identical too, if you turned off JavaScript (or, probably, if you did some clever user-sub-page override). In my opinion, this is about as elegant a solution (technically) as standard UI elements (and portable HTML) allow. At first, I thought the disappearing radio buttons were a bit odd, then I came to like the idea, but if they slow down browsers (presumably because they're having to re-render large parts of the page, and aren't very good at it) then we may need to look at disabling the JavaScript part and just letting people see both columns all the way down.
[1]:e.g. http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?action=history&id=MeatballWiki
I can't think of any better methods. The only other possibilities I see are pretty rubbish.
No... If you were dead-set on check boxes I suppose you could have manual submission, and a fall-back to a message complaining that you'd selected too many or too few (with JavaScript making that impossible, if enabled). But that's quite a bit more complex than just having a standard HTML form that essentially lets the browser do all that for you.