Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook, Special Edition

CHAPTER 5

FORMS

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Interactivity has always been an integral part of the Web, letting the user and site com-

municate through the exchange of information. Forms allow us to collect input from users

in an organized, predetermined fashion, and have always been sort of an “anything goes”

area when building websites. For instance, we’ll discover that marking up a form can be

handled in approximately 10,000 different ways. OK, perhaps not that many, but there are

several options to consider as well as steps that we can take to ensure our forms are struc-

tured in a way that’ll benefit both the user and site owner.

What are our options when marking up

a form?

Let’s take a look at four different ways to mark up the same, simple form—all of which

achieve similar results. We’ll go over each method and talk about the pros and cons that

are involved.

Method A: Using a table

<form action="/path/to/script" method="post">

<table>

<tr>

<th>Name:</th>

<td><input type="text" name="name" /></td>

</tr>

<tr>

<th>Email:</th>

<td><input type="text" name="email" /></td>

</tr>

<tr>

<th>&nbsp;</th>

<td><input type="submit" value="submit" /></td>

</tr>

</table>

</form>

Tables have long been used to mark up forms, and because of that frequent use, seeing

forms laid out in this particular way has become familiar to us: right- aligned text labels in

the left column, left- aligned form controls in the right column. Using a simple, two- column

table is one of the easiest ways to achieve a usable form layout.

Some could argue that a table isn’t necessary, while others believe that forms could be

considered tabular data. We’re not going to argue either side, but instead state that using

a table is sometimes the best way to achieve certain form layouts—especially complex

forms that involve multiple controls like radio buttons, select boxes, and so forth. Relying

solely on CSS to control the layout of complex forms can be frustrating, and often involves

adding extraneous <span> and <div> elements, with more code bloat than that of a

table.

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Let’s take a look at Figure 5-1 to see how Method A would appear in a typical visual browser.

Figure 5‑1. Method A as rendered

in a browser

You can see that by using a table, the labels and form elements line up nicely. For such a

simple form, though, I would probably opt to avoid the table altogether in favor of some-

thing that requires less markup. Unless this particular layout is crucial to the visual design

of the form, using a table here isn’t necessary. There are also a few accessibility concerns

we could address—and we will, while looking over the next two methods.

Method B: Tableless, but cramped

<form action="/path/to/script" method="post">

<p>

Name: <input type="text" name="name" /><br />

Email: <input type="text" name="email" /><br />

<input type="submit" value="submit" />

</p>

</form>

Using a single paragraph and a few <br /> elements to separate the items is a passable

solution—but could visually render a bit on the cramped side. Figure 5-2 shows how this

would typically appear in a browser.

Figure 5‑2. Method B as rendered

in a browser

You can see that while we got away without using a table, it looks rather cramped and ugly.

We also run into the problem of the form controls not lining up perfectly, as seen in

Figure 5-2.

We could alleviate some of the crowding by adding some margins to the <input> elements

using CSS like this:

input {

margin: 6px 0;

}