Hi, I'd like to ask others opinions about the issue of adding your own styles for web forms. It was something I would do years ago to both enhance the presence of web form elements, and also give them a style associated with the design of the site.
In the last few years I have gone away from this view and have decided to leave form elements in their native look and feel, purely for usability reasons. The reason or assumption being that form elements look different on every operating system, as they are a native component drawn by the operating system themselves. So my guess is that users can most easily identify them in their native format as that is the form the would most likely see them in the most. In Microsoft's "The Windows Interface Guidelines for Software Design", the sunken design of form fields is done to clearly identify them on the screen, but this seems to have been abandoned in XP (it's something I don't agree with, but I leave it as it is). I doubt if this was a well informed decision, because they certainly were not thinking of the issue of the combination of bright primary colours, red and blue, especially on people with aging eye sight (see http://www.charlesriver.com/titles/webuse.html p102). Just interested in others approach on this issue. Regards Geoff Deering ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
