The appearance attribute

The default display of the select1 that we just added was a drop-box. Howevever, often when there are only a couple of choices we would rather have them displayed as radio buttons. This is easily done in formsPlayer by adding the appearance attribute and giving it a value of full:

    <xf:select1 ref="replace" appearance="full">
      <xf:label>Replace:</xf:label>
      .
      .
      .
    </xf:select1>

Just to be clear, this attribute doesn't mean 'please give me radio buttons'--instead it informs an XForms processor that the author would like as many of the choices in the list to be available to the user as possible. Of course, how that actually pans out and gets implemented will be different on different systems; the effect of this on a voice-based XForms processor will be different to the effect on a GUI-based one, and different again to a mobile phone.

But the idea is that there is at least some similarity in the way this is implemented, and the author is in effect providing a 'hint' to the processor about what they would like to happen. In the case of formsPlayer, when appearance is set to full on a select1 then all of the options in the list are made available via radio buttons: