The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

HTML forms UI guidelines

I am writing a prototype of a web UI for a real world application.
It has more than 50 forms (automagically generated) but they look very ugly. Most of the articles I found focus on web sites design and do not cover the specific issues of web forms (alignement of the input fields, button positions, fixed/not fixed width of the form...).
So can you please guide me to find resources and articles on good HTML forms UI design?

555-1234
Saturday, May 15, 2004

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwui/html/iuiguidelines.asp

I think you are looking for what MS calls inductive interface and task based/oriented interface

blaZ
Saturday, May 15, 2004

These seem pretty useful:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/accessible-online-forms/1

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/simple-tricks-usable-forms

Out of curiousity, what kind of tool is doing the form generation?

OffMyMeds
Saturday, May 15, 2004

Thank you for the URLs.

OffMyMeds, the forms are generated and processed by a home-made system that uses a XML description file (the concept is similar to XAML or XUL.)

555-1234
Sunday, May 16, 2004

If your forms are generated automatically from any kind of template system, and you've kept your HTML reasonably clean, it should be a simple thing for a UI designer to make things look consistent and attractive.

That UI designer might also tell you the underlying interaction is a big mess, but that's different... :-)

ao
Tuesday, May 18, 2004