[whatwg] Select element suggestion

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Csaba Gabor wrote:
> 
> It is frequently the case that SELECT elements of size 1 (drop downs) are quite long, requiring scrolling to reach most of the options.  For example:
> Year a person was born in
> States of the US
> Countries of the world
> Height (in inches or cm)
> 
> This necessitates a minimum of 4 actions for most of the options (click 
> to pull down the select, click on scroll bar, drag scroll bar, click 
> desired option) vs. 2 actions (the first and last) for those options 
> near the top.  Clearly the time difference is significant, especially 
> when the same select element must be selected on repeated visits.  
> Furthermore, the overwhelming liklihood is that only a few of the many 
> options will ever be of interest to any individual.
> 
> Therefore, it makes sense to float those values to the top of the select 
> element in a reasonable way.

This seems like something the user agent could do on its own without help 
from the page, or that the server could do on its own without help from 
the client. I'm not sure that the language needs to be adjusted to support 
this idea.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'