171245 - [cust] text labels for address field and search fields.

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, enhancement)

Description

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

now that we have multiple test fields we need some kind of labels for those fields.

Comment 1

[Joe Hewitt (gone)]

fixed

Comment 2

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

hewitt, I don't see text labels for the various text fields (search and address)

Comment 3

[Joe Hewitt (gone)]

um, they are there, I see them clear as day, underneat the textboxes in the palette.

Comment 4

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

ahh. my mistake. I thouht these were like other labels and were intended to show
up in the actual toolbars. 

Comment 5

[Blake Ross]

um, asa, you filed the bug :) I'm sure what you meant was labels /next to/ the
fields, e.g. Address (as in IE) and Search.  Whether or not we need those is
another question, but this isn't fixed...

Comment 6

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Oh yeah, I did file the bug. And I was thinking that we should have labels for
the text fields in the toolbars. I think they should be to the left side of the
field. We need to have the discussion about turning on text for selective
toolbars I think. Maybe all or nothing is fine for now though. 

Comment 7

[David Tenser [:djst]]

I had some weird ideas about this in the forums and Hyatt replied with his
ideas. Maybe they are relevant here, if not, just ignore:

David Tenser wrote:
I've thought about this now and I have decided to agree with you that a novice
user probably will like this search field. However, there is one big (but easy
to solve) problem with the current implementation: There are no labels for the
address field and search field.

The address field should have the caption "A&ddress:" and the search field
should have "&Search:". The small bookmark-ish icon and magnifier isn't enough.

Now to the elegant solution: Add a Label object to the toolbar.

Currently, you can add Space, Separator and Flexible Space to a toolbar. You
should also be able to add Label. The easy way would be to just add these two
labels and nothing more, but of course, there *could* be an Add New Label
button, just as there is an Add New Toolbar button already. The "Add New Label"
button would display a dialog asking for the caption. Then that label could be
placed anywhere on the toolbar. Anyway, the important thing is that there are
labels for address and search field.

The reason why is of course that a power user like myself would only find the
"Address:" and "Search:" caption useless and remove them right away. But a
novice user would probably not understand what the two fields were if there are
no labels.

So the default toolbar would look something like this:

[Back] [Forw] [Reload] [Stop] [Home] | Address: |________________| Search:
|_________|

And "Address:" and "Search:" would be removable. Notice the separator between
[Home] and "Address:".

DaveH wrote:
Another idea might be to put the label *inside* the field, and make it disappear
when you focus the field. I think the AOL client does something like that.

The whole discussion can be found here:
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback/read.php?f=15&i=588&t=567

In the end, probably the easiest solution would be to just add the labels for
these two text fields and then add a checkbox in the toolbar customize dialog
saying "[X] Show text labels on Address and Search field"

Comment 8

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Wouldn't it make more sense to just have the "show as text/icons/both" work for
addressfield and search field? The text label could show to the left of the
field rather than under it for these and any other (extensions) fields added to
toolbars rather than under them like they do for other items in the toolbars. 

Comment 9

[Chu Alan "sprite"]

Attachment: adds urlbar and search label.

Comment 10

[Chu Alan "sprite"]

the patch adds label element in urlbar-container and search-container and handle
the show/hide of both labels as a special case in browser.css.

this method uses the mode setting from customize toolbar dialog, but there is no
general method provided in this patch to handle this specific behavior. 

any comemnts on this patch?

Comment 11

[Chu Alan "sprite"]

Attachment: patch v2

updated: 
1. tooltip for label and text field
2. addes css rule to make field label and the field closer :)

Comment 12

[Chu Alan "sprite"]

are there anybody available to review my patch? :)

Comment 13

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Taking QA Contact

Comment 14

[Jon Henry]

Comment on attachment 119679 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v2

Moving Chu's review request to Ben, Hewitt doesn't do reviews anymore to my
knowledge...

Comment 15

[Jon Henry]

Attachment: Updated patch

I've taken the liberty of un-bitrotting Chu's patch so that it applies to the
Aviary branch, and also cleaned up a few things. Most notably the changes in
customizeToolbar.css, which make the alignment of elements in the palette
consistent. Without those changes, the labels on the location and search bars
are next to their respective elements whereas every other element has its label
below it.

Now that I'm running with this patch applied, I think it looks a little weird,
although making it blazingly obvious what the search box is might be a good
idea for helping new users. Experienced users are going to turn off text labels
anyway. This might look better if all labels could be set to right-aligned (see
bug 215838).

Comment 16

[Jon Henry]

Comment on attachment 156319 [details] [diff] [review]
Updated patch

Asking mconnor for review...I hate to keep swamping you with requests for easy
bugs, if there's anyone else with a less full plate I can ask, I'd be glad to
know :).

Comment 17

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Blake, can you review this? 

Comment 18

[Jon Henry]

djst has (I think) a good suggestion in his recent blog post:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/djst/archives/006398.html

Rather than specifically labeling the search bar, we could display greyed out
text along the lines of "Enter search terms here", ala Thunderbird's recently
updated quick search bar. If that sounds like a better idea it shouldn't be too
hard to copy Tbird's code over.

Comment 19

[Prognathous]

I like the idea of having a greyed out string in the input box itself, but I
think a short "Search" would scale better than "Enter search terms here". This
would be more significant when Bug 205011 is fixed and the Search bar becomes
resizeable,

"Search" also sounds more universal and less newbie-oriented, which is a good
thing IMHO.

Prog.

Comment 20

[chris hofmann]

sounds like we might want to get a new patch based on some usability feedback we
got.  try to get for 1.0

Comment 21

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Ben says there will be no label for the address field. I'll be filing a followup
bug for getting some label-like text inside the search field. 

Comment 22

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

new bug is bug 258672