And yet another control that pretends to be a dropdown box, but isn't. No. I'm not complaining about the appearance or the fact that it has a search field while the real dropdown doesn't.<p>I'm complaining about the way it responds to mouse actions: The real dropdown box, on my machine, expands the menu on mouse down after a no-doubt OS-specific delay. The fake dropdown doesn't - it only reacts on mouse up.<p>Of course, you can't make a a control work exactly like its native counterpart - but that IMHO just means that you shouldn't even try imitating them and provide its own unique look.<p>I really dislike nearly-native controls - they feel wrong to me.<p>But don't get me wrong: The controls are really cool and incredibly useful. If only they didn't try to mimic the native look without quite matching it.
This project looks awesome. This stuff is annoying to have to replicate yourself, and I'm glad to see MooTools support as well.<p>That said, my first reaction when looking at the first Country dropdown example was that I liked the native one better since in OS X it shows me dozens of choices at once (fills most of the screen vertically) and then in the "after" suddenly I was constrained to only seeing 7 countries at a time. Not a huge deal but felt like a loss in usability (but a gain visually). If the faux dropdown was just a little taller in height it'd be better.<p>Secondly, this just killed iPhone support. Apple did a good job with <select>s on iOS and this completely breaks it. It should just turn itself off on iOS.
The more libs like this I see, the more I feel that the core HTML controls should be improved and expanded. They are getting really, really dated and don't address a lot of common problems.<p>Things I feel would make a lot of sense:<p>Collapsible trees.
Numeric sliders (preferably done like draggable digits <a href="http://worrydream.com/Tangle/" rel="nofollow">http://worrydream.com/Tangle/</a>).
Native drag-and-drop sipport for elements. (And yes, this <i>can</i> be done with plain forms. I can explain how if you want.)
Native rich tooltips and a standard notation to show that something has a tooltip.
Maybe tabs. I think you could do tabs with CSS, but I'm not 100% sure.<p>If most UI libraries have something, it probably would be a good addtion to HTML spec. It would work faster and eventually have better compatibility.
Best plug-in of the year, so far.<p>Apart from what it says, I do not see problems in IE7 or IE8 (there is some style issues in IE9, though). Also, it is nearly working in IE6. I think I'll try to diddle around with some z-index and CSS stuff to get it working. Can't be much more than that.
This nearly completely breaks the select ui on iOS. It should do some kind of feature detection so that it can disable itself on browsers that have alternate ui's for controls like this.<p>For example, this converts a select menu to an input field. On iOS the keyboard comes up instead of the select control.
Apparently Chosen takes the placeholder text from the select element's 'title' attribute; does it also support the official HTML5 syntax[1] for placeholder attributes in select elements?<p>How about integration with jQueryUI's theming system?<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-button-element.html#placeholder-label-option" rel="nofollow">http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...</a>
Um, what use this?<p>If I click on a dropdown box, I can already type the value on my keyboard to select it. No javascript necessary.<p>(using chromium on ubuntu)
For the multiple select, I like this one a lot: <a href="http://loudev.com/" rel="nofollow">http://loudev.com/</a><p>It's way simpler for the average user.
The UI widgets like this all have the same defects:<p>1. They are slow, as all their markup has to be generated on the client side each time the page loads<p>2. They are not ajax friendly. I mean that if you insert a select box in a HTML document with javascript, it will remain a plain native select box unless your script specifically calls the right widget's function. So you have to update all your scripts.<p>3. They are not drop-in replacements for native widgets, all your script must know how to handle these widgets for things like getting the widget's value, listening for events, etc.<p>Points 1 and 2 could be fixed by generating the widget's HTML code on the server side and using delegated events (like jQuery's delegate()). (Progressive Enhancement can still be achieved without doing _everything_ on the client side.)<p>Other than that, the idea of a text input on the top of the options list is awesome.
I've been using the jQuery UI ComboBox for a while, it's essentially this. - <a href="http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/combobox.html" rel="nofollow">http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/combobox.html</a>
I would also add a fuzzy matching. I.e. "unitd sta" should match "United States" even with the missing "e". Or "East coast" should match "The East Coast".
Love it! Sure it's not perfect, but it's a huge improvement already. I've had similar ideas myself but haven't gotten around to implementing them. The existing HTML input controls are clunky and haven't kept up with the pace of web development, maybe we can improve on them using CSS & JS until we develop a new set of canonical input primitives that then become standardized.
On the iPad, the custom control is decidedly worse. The native one is larger and more appropriate for the device. This idea of custom UI elements seems really bad. It's gonna be worse than native on any platform. The issues with native controls should be addressed on their respective platforms.
I think it's pretty cool, though it would be nice if they had a simplified single selection version. Which is to change a single select list into a text field with "instant search". The current incarnation make me first go for the pull down rather than just tabbing over and start typing.
So... why don't they use this thing on their own web app? The "Project / Task" select box becomes very unwieldy with a growing client base. I spend way too much time looking for the correct project almost every time I have to create a new entry.
Writing good widgets from scratch is an endless task. It's missing ARIA roles: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles#combobox" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles#combobox</a>
Sexy! I do agree with a previous comment that the more technologies like these that come out, the more apparant it becomes that HTML as a whole needs a long overdue makeover.