Slip Sliding Away: Build an HTML Slider Control

lease fill in this form. Those five words make anyone's heart sink. Filling in forms is rarely a delight, and Web forms are no exception. The more user-friendly you can make your forms, the less of a burden it causes users to fill out—and the more likely they are to fill the form out.. When you create Windows forms, you can simplify input with a variety of powerful and intuitive controls; but HTML doesn't support the same control set. But you can "roll your own" with the help of a little DHTML.

For example, suppose you need users to enter or select a value from a range of values. In a Windows form, you'd use a slider control, but sliders are among the missing controls in the HTML forms toolkit. But it's much easier for users to move a slider control than to pick an item from a huge drop-down list, or worse, to type in a value manually. In this article you'll see how to represent ranges of values in a very user-friendly and portable way using a slider.