I have a form that I am trying to create but it looks REALLY confusing (and my designer is refusing to let me use it for that very good reason).
The problem is (this shouldn't have surprised me) with containers. Specifically, I'm getting WAY too many redundant containers. If you look at the following image, you will see what we currently have:
Now there are a number of problems with this from the point of view of usability
First because the repeating "Widget" items can be one of 6 or so different things, these individual elements are meaningless as all they contain is the specific thing chosen.
Secondly because the outer containers use the same title as the inner, it is difficult to distinguish one from the other, its better to have "Widgets" and "Widget" if anything.
Because all the borders are identical, when you get a lot of containers (as I have) the bottom edges are very confusing.
Finally I were to mark this up as XML, the XML would look something like:
[widgets]
[shortcut]
[title]Some title[/title]
[group]
[Item link="someurl.html"]Some title[/item]
[Item link="someurl.html"]Some title[/item]
[/group]
[group]
[Item link="someurl.html"]Some title[/item]
[Item link="someurl.html"]Some title[/item]
[/group]
[/shortcut]
[/widgets]
Assuming I could get it to line up properly. If you look at this, the markup only goes 4 layers deep (3 if you don't use the widgets tag, which I probably wouldn't). The form however is 7 layers deep. This means that the form is about twice as complex as the markup it represents.
This image is, more or less, how I would like to see this form look:
This is closer to what I'm interested in. I realize that I've combined two models; with the big group (widget) and without (group and item). Ideally I'd like to choose which model but I would live without the outer widget container.
The other thing I might do, is not put a title on the Item containers. In this case I would like to see the controls for the adding/deleting and moving to appear with the fields and eliminate the title row all together.
Perhaps the thing to do is for repeating containers of the same type (like group and item) you get a single titled block with repeating, untitled elements. If you have repeating containers of different types, you don't get the outer container but the inner elements are all titled.
But I'm rambling
Adam
