Explain the function of input controls. Identify four (4) types of input control

Question

• Explain the function of input controls.
• Identify four (4) types of input control and explain the function of each.
• Provide an example of a data integrity error that could occur if each of these types of input control were not in place.
• Explain the advantages and disadvantages of restricting user interfaces. (User interfaces can often be restricted, limiting the user%u2019s ability to navigate to other areas of the system, or out of the system.)
• Design and build a graphical representation of a Web-based input for making a hotel reservation, using Visio or PowerPoint or an equivalent.

Explanation / Answer

An HTML form is a section of a document containing normal content, markup, and special elements called controls.%u201D These controls are commonly referred to as input controls, according to the World Wide Web Consortium. There are many types of input controls that can be used in a web form. They help to provide a framework for the kind of data that will be submitted by users. Selecting the correct input control for a data field is critical.
Text input, select box, radio button, and password are four examples of input controls. As pointed out by Ponce de Leon, most input controls are visual and interactive. There is also something called a hidden input control. They can be used to store system critical data, such as database key data, that the user does not need to interact with.
Text type input controls are used to input text. They provide a single-line input field in which any text can be entered. The text type input controls are useful for form data such as names, street addresses, and user names. This data is viewable on the screen, so it ought to not be used for passwords.

It is useful to consider the user interface at several distinct levels of abstraction and to develop a design and implementation for each. This simplifies the developer's task by allowing it to be divided into several smaller problems. The design of a user interface is often divided into the conceptual, semantic, syntactic, and lexical levels. The conceptual level describes the basic entities underlying the user's view of the system and the actions possible upon them. The semantic level describes the functions performed by the system. This corresponds to a description of the functional requirements of the system, but it does not address how the user will invoke the functions. The syntactic level describes the sequences of inputs and outputs necessary to invoke the functions described. The lexical level determines how the inputs and outputs are actually formed from primitive hardware operations.

The syntactic-semantic object-action model is a related approach; it, too, separates the task and computer concepts (i.e., the semantics in the previous paragraph) from the syntax for carrying out the task. For example, the task of writing a scientific journal article can be decomposed into the sub-tasks for writing the title page, the body, and the references. Similarly, the title page might be decomposed into a unique title, one or more authors, an abstract, and several keywords. To write a scientific article, the user must understand these task semantics. To use a word processor, the user must learn about computer semantics, such as directories, filenames, files, and the structure of a file. Finally, the user must learn the syntax of the commands for opening a file, inserting text, editing, and saving or printing the file. Novices often struggle to learn how to carry out their tasks on the computer and to remember the syntactic details. Once learned, the task and computer semantics are relatively stable in human memory, but the syntactic details must be frequently rehearsed. A knowledgeable user of one word processor who wishes to learn a second one only needs to learn the new syntactic details.

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