On Sun, 30 Sep 2012 13:41:30 -0700, Daniel Werner
<daniel.werner(a)wikimedia.de> wrote:
On Sep 29, 2012, at 4:51 AM, Daniel Friesen
<daniel(a)nadir-seen-fire.com
wrote:
Yes, multiselect is a VERY bad usability choice.
Frankly we shouldn't
use
it anywhere. If we're using JS to make
a better UI it would actually be much better to
output usable checkboxes
and then turn the checkboxes into a
special JS multi-select. Instead of outputting an
unusable multi-select
and compensating for it.
Sure, as long as there is JS available we
should turn the multi-select
into
something nicer. But the original idea behind this was that a multi
select
would still be more user friendly than an endless list of check-boxes
when
having around 300 choices (e.g. for languages).
Checkboxes would still be better for non-js users... in this case
multiselect is even worse. Now not only do you have to worry about users
not knowing they can select multiple items, when they try to actually
select a bunch of items their own computer is going to inevitably screw
them over at some point when they forget the ctrl or their finger slips
off of it, they click, and poof the dozens of items they selected ALL
disappear.
That kind of situation is incredibly more anti-user than a list of
checkboxes. And you can get most of the same scrolling effect just by
giving the checkbox list an overflow: auto;
Take jQuery chosen for example (thanks for the link
Yury), it takes a
multi-select as source and turns it into some very nice piece of UI. It
doesn't matter whether you originally have a bunch of check-boxes or a
multi-select from a JS perspective.
Anyhow, I would still appreciate if someone would merge the thing, it's
sitting around for too long already and it seems that it got stuck
because
of some very minor issue once again:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/8924/
Thanks!
--
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [
http://daniel.friesen.name]