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› May 30, 2003

DW: Forms, usability and W3C DOM

  • Reported by Nate

Peter-Paul Koch put together a very informative article for Digital Web Magazine: Forms, usability, and the W3C DOM. Quick summary - Use the DOM rather than DHTML to show and hide form elements for the sake of simplicity and usability. A suggested implementation keeps things very simple for markup artists, and yet it's extensible. Seems like the usefulness of this method could extend past complicated forms...

Comments

1. May 31, 2003 06:01 PM

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Joshua Kaufman Posted…

I don't know about anyone else, but I always thought part of DHTML was using the DOM. However, in the article PPK makes a definite distinction between the two. Can anyone help me to clarify this? Otherwise, I found the article to be excellent. Hiding form elements to improve usability is a great idea. Hopefully we'll see some more real world implementations of this in the future!

2. May 31, 2003 06:20 PM

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liorean Posted…

Well, the fact that the term DHTML was termed by Microsoft as a public name for their Trident rendering engine; and that it's come to mean the usage of the intermediate DOMs (d.all, d.layers) as well as the usage of DOM0 and the W3C DOM; does tend to make some distinction between them. However, I'd say that in general usage by web designers, the tern 'DHTML' includes the usage of DOM.

3. May 31, 2003 06:27 PM

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Dave Posted…

I think the distinction also should be made between "dynamic HTML" i.e. the ability of browsers to change the style and structure of a web page via JavaScript, and "DHTML" i.e. the term used for a pastiche of incompatible properties and methods cobbled together over the years by the various browser makers as they stumbled toward the DOM.