DropDown WTF
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On this site I found a "clever" solution for a selecion:
[IMG]http://i37.tinypic.com/4lsfh4.jpg[/IMG]
Suche - AnwaltOnline
Kostenlose Rechtsinformationen und Rechtsberatung zu fast allen Rechtsfragen: ✔ Kostenlose Anfrage ✔ vertraulich ⏱ schnell. AnwaltOnline - Problem gelöst.
On this site you can look up the rent index for a certain german city. ("Die Städte zur Auswahl:" means "The cities that are available:", "Mietspiegel" means "Rent index")
So on the dropdown with the character 'A' you can choose between all german cities, that start with an A. And so on. One dropdown for each character...Don't know, why they don't use a simple textfield. Perhaps they wanted to prevent SQL Injection...
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@Cayla Sha said:
On this site I found a "clever" solution for a selecion:
Suche - AnwaltOnline
Kostenlose Rechtsinformationen und Rechtsberatung zu fast allen Rechtsfragen: ✔ Kostenlose Anfrage ✔ vertraulich ⏱ schnell. AnwaltOnline - Problem gelöst.
Not quite the right page: http://www.anwaltonline.com/mietspiegel/staedte.html
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It would certainly get around the problem created by those irritating websites that use a country dropdown with "United States" at the top. Not being able to easily click and type "Un" to jump near "United Kingdom" would be is quite irksome. (Flash dropdowns usually don't accept keyboard input either, making them even more annoying to enter your date of birth on certain websites).
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@benryves said:
It would certainly get around the problem created by those irritating websites that use a country dropdown with "United States" at the top.
I guess they figured that if you're not american, you can't even use the Internet from your backwards country, so noone will ever need to actually change that option. They probably added the rest of the countries because they told them to in some web usability class.
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@benryves said:
It would certainly get around the problem created by those irritating websites that use a country dropdown with "United States" at the top. Not being able to easily click and type "Un" to jump near "United Kingdom" would be is quite irksome. (Flash dropdowns usually don't accept keyboard input either, making them even more annoying to enter your date of birth on certain websites).
But... ... But what about the United Arab Emirates? They partake of internet, too!
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@benryves said:
It would certainly get around the problem created by those irritating websites that use a country dropdown with "United States" at the top. Not being able to easily click and type "Un" to jump near "United Kingdom" would be is quite irksome. (Flash dropdowns usually don't accept keyboard input either, making them even more annoying to enter your date of birth on certain websites).
Even more irksome is when you click and type "un", and the dropdown sends you off to Namibia.
But yeah, a good-designed website would use geo-location to fill in the country field with a default value.
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@DOA said:
I guess they figured that if you're not american, you can't even use the Internet from your backwards country, so noone will ever need to actually change that option.
Nonsense: as an American I'm well aware that you dirty mud people are able to use your OLPCs to access our Internet during the 30 minutes of electricity you have per day. In fact, the newest usability guidelines I've drawn up make copious use of images to guide navigation, allowing our software to transcend language barriers. For example: "OK" buttons have been replaced with photos of a hot meal or bottle of penicillin, whereas error messages are now communicated with video of a charging water buffalo.
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@DOA said:
I guess they figured that if you're not american, you can't even use the Internet from your backwards country, so noone will ever need to actually change that option.
I always thought it was because Americans were too stupid to find "United States" in an alpha-sorted list. Either that or because Americans will report your website as a terrorist site because Afghanistan is alphabetically the first country, and therefore the default in your list.
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@joemck said:
@DOA said:
I guess they figured that if you're not american, you can't even use the Internet from your backwards country, so noone will ever need to actually change that option.
I always thought it was because Americans were too stupid to find "United States" in an alpha-sorted list. Either that or because Americans will report your website as a terrorist site because Afghanistan is alphabetically the first country, and therefore the default in your list.
Ironically the people from most countries probably would be too "stupid" to find their country name in a drop down list. Most people in the world probably wouldn't not even know how to use a drop down list. Most people in the world are too "stupid" to even get to that web page in the first place.
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@joemck said:
I always thought it was because Americans were too stupid to find "United States" in an alpha-sorted list. Either that or because Americans will report your website as a terrorist site because Afghanistan is alphabetically the first country, and therefore the default in your list.
Dude, that shit pisses me off so much. Countries should be sorted by awesomeness, with America at the top, Afghanistan second-to-last and Europe at the end.
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@tster said:
@joemck said:
@DOA said:
I guess they figured that if you're not american, you can't even use the Internet from your backwards country, so noone will ever need to actually change that option.
I always thought it was because Americans were too stupid to find "United States" in an alpha-sorted list. Either that or because Americans will report your website as a terrorist site because Afghanistan is alphabetically the first country, and therefore the default in your list.
Ironically the people from most countries probably would be too "stupid" to find their country name in a drop down list. Most people in the world probably wouldn't not even know how to use a drop down list. Most people in the world are too "stupid" to even get to that web page in the first place.
Can I just say how gay drop-downs for country/state are in the first place? Give me a text box with auto-suggest, dammit. And for the people who just cannot comprehend typing the name of their state, a button or something that opens up a drop-down. Drop-downs can be such a pain-in-the-ass, assuming they're even done right.
Yes, I know I can start typing to do prefix matching in a drop-down, but that's not good enough; you have to type everything quickly and accurately, you can't see multiple matches at the same time, it won't match on any part of the entry or sort by relevence and if you make a typo you have to start all over. And god help you if the geniuses who designed the site decided to re-invent the drop-down with godawful hackery involving flash or by using JS/CSS to create pseudo-drop-downs out of divs and uls.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Can I just say how gay drop-downs for country/state are in the first place? Give me a text box with auto-suggest, dammit. And for the people who just cannot comprehend typing the name of their state, a button or something that opens up a drop-down. Drop-downs can be such a pain-in-the-ass, assuming they're even done right.
Okay. ... You'll need to turn on your Javascript though, which will have you bitching that "this stupid simple form requires Javascript"
The real problem is that there is no cross-platform implementation of a combobox (which is, IMO, one of Microsoft's greatests gifts to the world and the most compelling reason to continue developing applications for the desktop instead of doing everything web-based) and thus HTML doesn't support it.
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@Weng said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Can I just say how gay drop-downs for country/state are in the first place? Give me a text box with auto-suggest, dammit. And for the people who just cannot comprehend typing the name of their state, a button or something that opens up a drop-down. Drop-downs can be such a pain-in-the-ass, assuming they're even done right.
Okay. ... You'll need to turn on your Javascript though, which will have you bitching that "this stupid simple form requires Javascript"
The real problem is that there is no cross-platform implementation of a combobox (which is, IMO, one of Microsoft's greatests gifts to the world and the most compelling reason to continue developing applications for the desktop instead of doing everything web-based) and thus HTML doesn't support it.
I have no issue with either drop-downs or a little Javascript text box auto-suggest action, because I know it could be so much worse. In one noteworthy thread on another forum, somebody actually suggested using a pop-up world map widget for country/state selection.
This, of course, not only makes the King Kong stupid assumption that people can find a given country (even with labels), but also assumes that the same clowns who can't make a damn date-selection calendar widget work right are going to be able to correctly detect a click on Andorra or the Vatican (assuming you can even see them). And I really hate to think what would happen when we have to redraw Eastern Europe after the next round of civil wars and genocides.
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@Justice said:
I have no issue with either drop-downs or a little Javascript text box auto-suggest action, because I know it could be so much worse. In one noteworthy thread on another forum, somebody actually suggested using a pop-up world map widget for country/state selection.
This, of course, not only makes the King Kong stupid assumption that people can find a given country (even with labels), but also assumes that the same clowns who can't make a damn date-selection calendar widget work right are going to be able to correctly detect a click on Andorra or the Vatican (assuming you can even see them).
Ah, but what if it used the awesome map from earlier in this thread?
@Justice said:
And I really hate to think what would happen when we have to redraw Eastern Europe after the next round of civil wars and genocides.
Who cares? They're all dead so if anyone ships anything there, we just keep it for ourselves.
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@Weng said:
Okay. ... You'll need to turn on your Javascript though, which will have you bitching that "this stupid simple form requires Javascript"
Clearly you don't know me well enough, then. I despise the whiny idiots who think complaining about JS makes them insightful.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Justice said:
I have no issue with either drop-downs or a little Javascript text box auto-suggest action, because I know it could be so much worse. In one noteworthy thread on another forum, somebody actually suggested using a pop-up world map widget for country/state selection.
This, of course, not only makes the King Kong stupid assumption that people can find a given country (even with labels), but also assumes that the same clowns who can't make a damn date-selection calendar widget work right are going to be able to correctly detect a click on Andorra or the Vatican (assuming you can even see them).
Ah, but what if it used the awesome map from earlier in this thread?
I'm planning to use this one for my implementation:
![http://i37.tinypic.com/4lsfh4.jpg[/IMG]](http://i37.tinypic.com/4lsfh4.jpg%5B/IMG%5D){kind=link}