Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 08/31/06 11:52

emma.sax@gmail.com <emma.sax@gmail.com> scripsit:

> I've been trying to find out the reasons behind placing the label to
> the right of a checkbox or radio button and came across and old post:
>
>> Toby A Inkster <UseTheAddressInMy...@deadspam.com> wrote:

Toby's description of the topic was excellent. From the practical authoring
point of view, there's hardly anything to be added to it.

(Well, with obvious modifications by the "mutatis mutandis" principle: if
the writing direction is from right to left, as it normally is for Hebrew
and Arabic script, then naturally the checkbox or radio button appears to
the right of the label - so that it appears _before_ the label as usual.)

> Are there any reasons/documentation to why they came to be positioned
> in this way, apart from being aesthetically pleasing? Why has it
> become good practice - who first said said this was how we should do
> it?

As far as I can remember, it's been an almost ubiquous practice since the
early days (of using forms on web pages). The obvious explanation is that
this was copied from paper forms (and existing electronic forms), where the
purpose is to make the boxes or buttons appear as aligned, in a column.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Back to original message]