Re:Uniform - Sexy forms with jQuery
by henrikschroder on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @07:18AM
(#1114682)
Have you ever wished you could style checkboxes, drop down menus, radio buttons, and file upload inputs? Ever wished you could control the look and feel of your form elements between all browsers?
No, because that is generally bad usability design. It's not quite as bad as the ultimate atrocity: making your own scrollbars, but changing the feel of widgets is bad, because it only makes it harder for people to manipulate them. It's ok to change the look if you are careful to preserve the feel and functionality.
A quick test of that example shows it's lacking visual indication of focus. I can still move between them and manipulate them with tab and space and arrow keys, but I don't know where I am. If that's just part of the theme, fine, but if the framework lacks support for it, not so fine.
On the other hand, I hope this library (or similar) becomes very popular among those that absolutely have to change widgets, because then you can address the usability issues in the library. If everyone rolls their own, you will end up with quite a few usability horrors.
Re:Uniform - Sexy forms with jQuery
by johns on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @02:11AM
(#1114419)
Why not include a matching style for textboxes? Those styled inputs are going to look pretty jarring next to native textboxes and creating matching styles for them is enough work for me that I wouldn't do it.
Overall they look nice, but with the incomplete control set and the gotchas listed (doesn't automatically handle dynamic changes and no IE6 support) it has a long way to go.
Re:Uniform - Sexy forms with jQuery
by ionfish on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @06:27AM
(#1114641)
Ojay.Forms handles dynamic changes and supports IE6. You have to write your own styling, though, but generally one would have to do that with Uniform anyway.
Re:Uniform - Sexy forms with jQuery
by iaskwhy on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @09:45AM
(#1114923)
On a quick test, drop down boxes don't work on Chrome 4: when I click on the scroll bar it closes down. I've seen this bug somewhere else two years ago and there was some workaround but still...
Re:Uniform - Sexy forms with jQuery
by ionfish on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @11:10AM
(#1115179)
Yes, we need to do some work to make things properly compatible with Chrome. Hopefully I'll have some spare time in the next couple of weeks to do that.
Re:Uniform - Sexy forms with jQuery
by yurifury on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @04:06AM
(#1114515)
In the default theme, the disabled checkbox and radio buttons look too much like the enabled ones, especially when they're arranged like on the landing page, i.e. enabled / checked / disabled. Otherwise, sexy.
Re:Uniform - Sexy forms with jQuery
by jiaaro on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @12:32PM
(#1115417)
unfortunately much of themeroller's flexability depends on images. maybe more CSS support among popular browsers and more consistent CSS support will make it possible to achieve more with less images some day (hopefully none some day)
Re:Uniform - Sexy forms with jQuery
by Pistos2 on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @11:14AM
(#1115188)
I toyed with the code a bit (which was a bit bizarre looking until I realized the mix of tabs and spaces was meant to be viewed with tabs equalling 2 spaces). One minor thing worth noting: The demo page has a "console.log(...)" statement in it. That causes an error in Opera, so I took it out.
Here's why the dropdown doesn't [quite] work in Opera:
Uniform wraps form elements with divs and spans in order to achieve the altered look. The actual form elements are set to opacity 0 to hide them. For some reason (which I couldn't figure out), the actual select element ends up with a height of 5 pixels. You'll see that if you click on the upper 5 pixels of the dropdown, you'll get the dropdown to open up like it should.
The simple fix was to force the height of the select element with CSS to something bigger, such as 23px. I added "height: 23px;" to this CSS block: http://github.com/pixelmatrix/uniform/blob/master/css/unifor... and then the dropdown began working as advertised.
Re:Uniform - Sexy forms with jQuery
by pixelmatrix on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @12:25PM
(#1115387)
Hey guys, thanks for the feedback. Constantly trying to improve things. If you have bug reports, please post them in Github's issue tracker. I pay close attention to issues posted there.
There have been a lot of requests to add styles for inputs/textareas and buttons. I do plan to add styles for those in the next version.
Also, Opera support is coming. I played around yesterday and I found a workaround for the bug that was plaguing it: not being able to hide form elements.
Can someone post more details on the Chrome 4 bug mentioned in the issue tracker?
Re:Uniform - Sexy forms with jQuery
by lsb on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @07:59AM
(#1114730)
Here's something egregious: the names of the radio buttons or the check boxes aren't labels for the input, and you can't click on them to select the option.
Re:Uniform - Sexy forms with jQuery
by daemianmack on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @02:38PM
(#1115767)
Very nice. The developer's responsiveness to bug reports is what makes this the best form-styling solution for a side project I'm working on at the moment; this should be pretty well-vetted. Josh, thanks for your efforts!
Re:Uniform - Sexy forms with jQuery
by henrikschroder on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @07:22AM
(#1114688)
There should be millions of those around if you need one, the problem is that such a widget isn't part of the html standard, there's no baseline functionality that you can extend and make pretty, you have to do it all yourself.
No, because that is generally bad usability design. It's not quite as bad as the ultimate atrocity: making your own scrollbars, but changing the feel of widgets is bad, because it only makes it harder for people to manipulate them. It's ok to change the look if you are careful to preserve the feel and functionality.
A quick test of that example shows it's lacking visual indication of focus. I can still move between them and manipulate them with tab and space and arrow keys, but I don't know where I am. If that's just part of the theme, fine, but if the framework lacks support for it, not so fine.
On the other hand, I hope this library (or similar) becomes very popular among those that absolutely have to change widgets, because then you can address the usability issues in the library. If everyone rolls their own, you will end up with quite a few usability horrors.
Overall they look nice, but with the incomplete control set and the gotchas listed (doesn't automatically handle dynamic changes and no IE6 support) it has a long way to go.
http://ojay.othermedia.org/articles/forms.html
Anyway, it's a nice idea!
Also, I find the themeroller a bit clumsy, spitting out whole zip files - rather than just little my-theme.css files.
Here's why the dropdown doesn't [quite] work in Opera:
Uniform wraps form elements with divs and spans in order to achieve the altered look. The actual form elements are set to opacity 0 to hide them. For some reason (which I couldn't figure out), the actual select element ends up with a height of 5 pixels. You'll see that if you click on the upper 5 pixels of the dropdown, you'll get the dropdown to open up like it should.
The simple fix was to force the height of the select element with CSS to something bigger, such as 23px. I added "height: 23px;" to this CSS block: http://github.com/pixelmatrix/uniform/blob/master/css/unifor... and then the dropdown began working as advertised.
I was a bit offended by the "155 KB download", but when downloaded and extracted it is just around 50 KBytes.
There have been a lot of requests to add styles for inputs/textareas and buttons. I do plan to add styles for those in the next version.
Also, Opera support is coming. I played around yesterday and I found a workaround for the bug that was plaguing it: not being able to hide form elements.
Can someone post more details on the Chrome 4 bug mentioned in the issue tracker?
http://diveintohtml5.org/forms.html#type-date
But "support is… sparse".