On Sun, 30 Sep 2012 13:41:30 -0700, Daniel Werner daniel.werner@wikimedia.de wrote:
On Sep 29, 2012, at 4:51 AM, Daniel Friesen daniel@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!