Introducing Open Forms
17 points by FedericoSchonborn
17 points by FedericoSchonborn
I had a crazy train of thought related to a similar idea.
I think surveys about our trade are important. I'm sad that likely StackOverflow's downfall will take their yearly survey with them.
But when filling those surveys, the web UI always kill me. I started thinking about an open format for surveys that would allow for usable "clients"; such as a good web UI with awesome keyboard shortcuts. I suspect it's absurd to think one would fill their surveys from the comfort of Vim or Emacs, but weirdest stuff has happened!
(I also had a work tie-in; in most of my jobs I provide tools to my colleagues, I've always thought that making feedback of my tools easier would lead to more quality. In the past I've sent surveys and it's been useful- but it still requires more effort than you would think.)
I think when talking about shortcuts you need to start from functionality desired. Tab is not that bad for forms where you fill almost all the fields…
This came mostly from the typical "grid" of "rate this statements from completely disagree to completely agree", with typically 7 or so elements across and maybe 10 rows.
Being able to see the current row highlighted, hitting a number to rate, and skipping to the next row would save a tremendous amount of time.
But I still think this is overkill :D... And maybe that a key point of surveys is maximizing the cost/benefit ratio of filling them :)
I wonder if modern CSS allows the real keyboard way of thinking (what you said is you have ten numerical edit boxes, adjacent in tab order) to be auto-synced with the mouse-way radio-button-grid without scripts.
I hadn't thought of using CSS to set up keyboard shortcuts. That would be really clever! (E.g. you could change keyboard shortcuts through your currently selected element and stuff?)
But I guess the base in HTML would be accesskey and it seems quite limited and MDN recommends not using it :(
Maybe you are thinking too small? I am saying that you recognise that you have a column of editboxes (it is not just a shortcut thing), then plan how to sync that with the clickable radiobuttons. But yeah probably too much to ask to do without JS. With JS you can just use onclick/onchange to sync the values.
it is cool, but I do wonder if it isn't overkill.
seems like modern web already has this solved? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Guides/Offline_and_background_operation