The colours of this posh thing on the left will clash with the ROW (Rest of this website). Sorry for that, but it’s a meaningful issue and we’ll have to be serious about it.

Quiet is the new Loud, but POSH is no more than the same old everyday job with now having a name for it. It’s about writing plain old semantic HTML instead of semantic html. It is <p></p> instead of <font></font>. And it is not beta but phi, chi or psi. It’s the web’s All you need is love, its Street Fighting Man or its Bitter Sweet Symphony. It is bigger than Walt Whitman and smarter than Joanne K. Rowling. It’s as strong as Colt Seavers. A White Russian without old-fashioned glasses. It is perfectly well-balanced, you can read it without having to look at it. And it doesn’t smell. It sounds like Barry White and we got it together, baby.
All that is why we love it so much.

Read more about POSH

And by the way: they say that the german acronym for spicy websites may used to be »fesch«, which is feines, einfaches, semantisch codiertes HTML. It sounds similar to »Flash« but we like it anyway.

(POSH via Vorsprungdurchwebstandards)

(Dieser Artikel wurde auf Deutsch im SELFHTML aktuell Weblog veröffentlicht: »Ansatz für flexible, mehrspaltige Formulare«)

Fluid web forms?

When it comes to fit a web form into a fluid layout we usually point out several reasons why form elements should be pixel based. That is because we are totally aware of web forms being part of the browser/system and therefore do not give authority to the web designer. Sort of fundamental perception. Actually, styling web forms is hard work, even pixel sized, and could turn out into the hell of a job if specification says: make it fluid.

So, here we are and asking: why should a web form be fluid? Why go to the time and effort of develop a form that is based on input fields with flexible widths? Doesn’t make sense.
Sure it may come to make sense when the form has multiple columns and a scaling form would allow input fields to grab content that otherwise would have been cut off in a fixed pixel based form. Single-column input fields are hopefully long enough at any time, but a multi-column form may benefit from flexible widths.

One last thought: why do we go for multi-column forms instead of simple single-column ones? It’s all about conformity with user expectation (buzzword) and the use for suggestive input fields which comply with the content they may receive. For instance a submission of the user’s last name requires a longer input field than a field for the few chars of his street number. According to this idea a discrepancy between (the length of) input fields and its estimated amount of data may distract the user. As multi-column forms allow input fields with different sizes — at least our form does — they may correspond to the user’s expectation.

Den ganzen Artikel lesen: »Approach to flexible multi-column forms«