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Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes

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2012-10-16 8:17, Andrew Poulos wrote:

> The user needs to select one or more items. I can't use radio button
> sets because that limits you to only one selected item, but if I use
> checkboxes it means users can have no selected items.

HTML is really rather limited in issues like this.

> My options are:
>
> 1. Use checkboxes and when the user submits the form tell them to make a
> selection if no selection has been made. This seems the obvious choice
> but I'd rather solve the problem with design rather than message boxes.

I'm afraid there is no design solution other than checking that the user 
has selected at least one alternative.

You could try to apply the principle of early error detection by 
checking the situation whenever any field after the set of checkboxes is 
focused on. But this might be confusing, and people don't always fill 
out forms sequentially. As a rule, checking on submit time (and, 
naturally, in server-side code, if the form data is submitted to a 
server) is sufficient - unless the page works in a stepwise, 
application-like manner where the set of checkboxes is one step, so that 
filling out the form is sequential in a forced manner. In such a setup, 
you could show just the checkboxes (and explanations) and provide a 
"Continue" button only after at least one choice has been made.

> 2. Use checkboxes and don't let the user uncheck the last checked
> checkbox in the set. This means that a checkbox may not behave as expected.

And initially there is no checked checkbox, so this would not work to 
prevent the most common scenario: the user just skips the set of 
checkboxes without checking anything.

> Or is there some other control that I can create/design that is
> intuitive to use to achieve the same thing?

Well, in theory you could use a <select> element with the attributes 
'required' and 'multiple':

<select required multiple size=5 name=sel>
<option>foo
<option>bar
<option>zap
<option>something
<option>something else
</select>

However, this
a) does not enforce the requirement "at least one" unless the browser 
supports the HTML5 attribute 'required' (though you can of course add 
such a check in JavaScript)
b) on browsers that do support it, the user sees an 
implementation-dependent error message if he tries to proceed without 
making any choice
c) <select> with 'multiple' means poor usability: users don't encounter 
them often, and there's little intuitiveness in the usage.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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radiobuttons and checkboxes Andrew Poulos <ap_prog@hotmail.com> - 2012-10-16 16:17 +1100
  Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> - 2012-10-16 11:09 +0300
  Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes "Tom de Neef" <tdeneef@qolor.nl> - 2012-10-16 12:27 +0200
    Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> - 2012-10-16 15:20 +0300
    Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2012-10-16 21:02 +0200
  Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes Scott Sauyet <scott.sauyet@gmail.com> - 2012-10-16 04:30 -0700
  Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes SAM <stephanemoriaux.NoAdmin@wanadoo.fr.invalid> - 2012-10-16 16:44 +0200
    Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> - 2012-10-16 19:32 +0300
      Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes SAM <stephanemoriaux.NoAdmin@wanadoo.fr.invalid> - 2012-10-17 00:51 +0200
  Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes JJ <jaejunks_at@_googlemail_dot._com> - 2012-10-16 14:58 +0000
  Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes Matt McDonald <matt@fortybelow.ca> - 2012-10-16 12:00 -0400
    Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> - 2012-10-16 19:30 +0300
  Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes Denis McMahon <denismfmcmahon@gmail.com> - 2012-10-16 17:23 +0000
  Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes Denis McMahon <denismfmcmahon@gmail.com> - 2012-10-16 17:33 +0000
  Re: radiobuttons and checkboxes Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2012-10-16 21:00 +0200

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