What makes good web form styling for business applications?

Question

Styling forms (form elements) is something that even Eric Meyer prefers to avoid . However, most business forms, and that is where styling is at issue; 'contact us' forms are easy to style, put window estate at a premium, with more 'document level' (eg invoice) fields, plus 'detail level' (eg invoice line) fields.

Factors I often find at play are: At my minimum, at least two horizontally adjacent fieldsets are required. In applications vs. public web pages, fixed positioning vs fluid layout is often better. Quantity of content is important, vs. exaggerated readability. Users know the system, and cues etc. take a back seat.

In light of factors like these, is there any available guidence for styling web form based applications? Are there any CSS or JavaScript frameworks that would make my quest to style these applications better than Visual Studios still pathetic 'Auto-format' (what drugs were those people on? I will never take them .)

Answer 1

You could use JQuery and some of its various plug-ins to help utilize the screen real estate more efficiently. For example, the "InField Labels" plugin

http://fuelyourcoding.com/scripts/infield/

allows you to place your field labels inside your controls.