Re: [xwiki-devs] [UX][Vote] New Administration forms width: partial or full

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 14:25, Marius Dumitru Florea < mariusdumitru.florea(a)xwiki.com&gt; wrote: Until the form standard, we had all kinds of sizes for text inputs, textareas, select boxes. This created a very messy/not standardized feeling. Test: remove "xform" class from <form class="xform half". Results: http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Polls/AdministrationFormsfu… http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Polls/AdministrationFormsfu… Having all controls the same width the form layout presents itself differently: it look compact, aligned and unitary. Beside the unitary look, you can have also some technical reasons. The other solution beside a 100% width for most of the controls, would have been to set some standardized sizes for each type of control. This sizes are already defined in "Size" column of the "Usage" category http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/DevGuide/VerticalForms and are recommended to be used on future forms (and also to be modified on the old forms - already done for some forms I revised). The problem with this approach is that this means that we should have changed all the existing code that contained forms elements in order for the forms to look unitary and standardized. Also, some browsers (like IE) don't render the same width for different controls even if you specify the same size (ex. <input type='text' size='60' will be longer than <input type='password' size='60' ). So this means again different widths, more frustration (obs. even with width 100% for all controls, <select> is still rendered shorter). the width of our form fields so it matches the length of the expected input are: credit card number (16 digits), credit card security code (4 digits), dates (2 digits + x + 4digits, but this case can be replaced with other solutions: date pickers, selects, etc). This are some of the cases where we know the exact size of the field and can act accordingly. Beside them, there are no rules and all is limited to what the developer/designer thinks fits the layout. We already have an exception for "Inline" layout forms ( http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/DevGuide/InlineForms ) and we can make styles also for the cases mentioned above, but those cases are not encountered in XE standard distribution. Hope this answers the question, Caty