Tags: checkbox

Custom Styling Form Inputs With Modern CSS Features | CSS-Tricks

It’s now easier than ever to style form controls without sacrificing semantics and accessibility:

The reason is that we can finally style the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements on the <input> tag itself. This means we can keep and style an <input> and won’t need any extra elements. Before, we had to rely on the likes of an extra <div> or <span>, to pull off a custom design.

The demo is really nice. And best of all, you can wrap all of these CSS enhancements in a feaure query:

Hopefully, you’re seeing how nice it is to create custom form styles these days. It requires less markup, thanks to pseudo-elements that are directly on form inputs. It requires less fancy style switching, thanks to custom properties. And it has pretty darn good browser support, thanks to @supports.

Is CSS Turing Complete? | Lara Schenck

This starts as a good bit of computer science nerdery, that kind of answers the question in the title:

Alone, CSS is not Turing complete. CSS plus HTML plus user input is Turing complete!

And so the takeaway here is bigger than just speculation about Turing completeness:

Given that CSS is a domain-specific language for styling user interface, this makes a lot of sense! CSS + HTML + Human = Turing complete.

At the end of that day, as CSS developers that is the language we really write. CSS is incomplete without HTML, and a styled interface is incomplete without a human to use it.

On Designing and Building Toggle Switches

Sara shows a few different approaches to building accessible toggle switches:

Always, always start thinking about the markup and accessibility when building components, regardless of how small or simple they seem.

Nobody Said CSS Is Easy

One thing I gained a stronger awareness of (simply from working with checkboxes) is that it’s important to progressively enhance UI components, so that a fancy custom one is able to fall back to the default browser styles and functionality. This way, a user can still access the UI if JavaScript or CSS fail.

Under-Engineered Custom Radio Buttons and Checkboxen | Adrian Roselli

Stylish and accessible checkboxes and radio buttons accompanied by an explanation of the CSS involved.

No images were harmed in the making of these form controls.

WTF, forms?

Here’s a CSS file that will give you a bit more control over styling some form elements. The thinking behind the CSS for each element is explained nice and clearly.

We’ve updated the radios and checkboxes on GOV.UK | GDS design notes

I always loved the way that Gov.uk styled their radio buttns and checkboxes with nice big visible labels, but it turns out that users never used the label area. And because it’s still so frickin’ hard to style native form elements, custom controls with generated content is the only way to go if you want nice big hit areas.

Simply Jonathan: Multiple values for checkboxes

Following on from the post by Aaron that I linked to, more details about sending (and receiving) values from multiple checkboxes with the same name.

Affirming User Choice With Checkboxes, From the Notebook of Aaron Gustafson

Well, this is timely! Just today I was having a really good natter with Charlotte about using checkboxes, specifically sending multiple values to the server:

You’ll notice that the name given to each of these checkbox input elements is the same: “reservation-requested-device[]”. The square brackets (“[]”) at the end of the name are the magic bit that allows the values of each chosen “reservation-requested-device” checkbox to be submitted as the value of “reservation-requested-device”.

See, I wasn’t sure whether that was just a PHP thing (the only server-side input-handling I’ve had much experience of) or whether it was a more general way of sending multiple values.

Update: It seems that the square brackets are indeed a PHP thing. Multiple values will be sent in any case. See this test case.

GOV.UK elements

I really like the clear styling of checkboxes and radio buttons in the GDS pattern library. Fitts’s law in action.

A no-javascript toggle content feature

A clever way of doing progressive disclosure with CSS.

Eric's Archived Thoughts: Formal Weirdness

Eric explores the dark cabbalistic world of attempting to style form controls. This explains why he doesn't use the universal selector for resetting default styles.

Custom checkboxes

A truly excellent piece of DOM scripting by Steve Chipman that replaces checkboxes with images.