19 July, 2011
By Simone D'Amico
Chosen is a javascript plug-in makes long, unwieldy select boxes much more user-friendly. It is currently available in both jQuery and Prototype flavors.
Why use Chosen?
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User Friendly
Instead of forcing your users to scroll through a giant list of items, they can just start typing the name of the item they were looking for. Non-matching entries are removed from view and choices can be selected using enter or mouse click.
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Progressive Enhancement
Because chosen replaces normal html select fields, you don’t need to do anything special to make it work for browsers without javascript. You don’t need to do anything special on the back end to handle the data either — the form field still gets submitted as normal.
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Painless Setup
Add Chosen’s files to your app and then add the class chzn-select to your select box. Chosen automatically respects optgroups, selected state, the multiple attribute and browser tab order. You don’t need to do anything else except customize the style as you see fit.
- Website: http://harvesthq.github.com/chosen/
