Tags: checkboxes

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.

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.

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.

Custom checkboxes

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