Webpages and sliders

December 8, 2010 11:35 AM

Should I use a HTML5 slider or a JQuery slider?

I'm making a small interactive website to display some simple analysis and want the user to be able to enter data using sliders. What is the best way of making a slider?

I'm not very familiar with JQuery which is why I ask but I have learned a few snippets already. Making a slider using HTML5 is quite easy, but it seems that it might not display in some browsers.

posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Can you expect your target market to have newer browsers? You might want to look at:

Creating Cross Browser HTML5 Forms Now, Using modernizr, webforms2 and html5Widgets

as there are a few tools there that should make using newer HTML5 functions work in older browsers.
posted by backwards guitar at 11:41 AM on December 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Javascript/jQuery is pretty great when it comes to supporting both recent and older browsers - unless your site caters to an audience that's mostly going to be using HTML5 capable browsers, I'd avoid it for anything essential. Using a library like Highcharts makes creating interactive data things in jQuery simpler, if you don't want to start from scratch.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 11:44 AM on December 8, 2010

I would target the native html5 slider where it exists, and fall back to a JS solution, which must then also fall back to non-JS input (dropdown? text?) for those who do not have JS enabled. A pain, but thorough.
posted by misterbrandt at 12:00 PM on December 8, 2010

There are several pretty good jQuery sliders out there already (for example) - lots of potential to do nifty things with them.
posted by gomichild at 1:05 PM on December 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

I do a lot of web development, and I'd love to use an HTML slider, but very few browsers have any kind of HTML5 support; and those that do aren't widely used. If you want your site to be actually usable by the majority of internetters, use JQuery.
posted by blue_beetle at 2:51 PM on December 8, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestions, hivemind! I will refrain from HTML5 sliders and use a library (OverlappingElvis I'm using Highcharts to make my graphs - it is amazing!).
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 7:24 AM on December 9, 2010