Keeping Track

If you’ve ever filled out a form at Motor Vehicles, you know that even paper forms can be lengthy, complex, and maddening. This happens in the web too, but fortunately, HTML gives us several ways to manage how form data is both displayed and received.

The first has to do with labeling and accessibility. Labels and ids expand the clickable area to all inclusions of the selection (such as the text), rather than just the button or checkbox.

Next, we can visually collect related form elements into fieldsets with legends. These create bounding boxes that signify when a new type of input will be asked, or group similar question-sets.