Selecting items from a collection is one of the most common tasks users perform with graphical user interfaces. Practically every application supports this task with a selection feature different from that of any other application. Defects are common, especially in manipulating selections of non-adjacent elements, and flexible selection features are often missing when they would clearly be useful. As a consequence, user effort is wasted. The loss of productivity is experienced in small doses, but all computer users are impacted. The undesirable state of support for multi-element selection prevails because the same selection features are redesigned and reimplemented repeatedly. This article seeks to establish common abstractions for multi-selection. It gives generic but precise meanings to selection operations and makes multi-selection reusable; a JavaScript implementation is described. Application vendors benefit because of reduced development effort. Users benefit because correct and consistent multi-selection becomes available in more contexts.
@InProceedings{jarvi_et_al:LIPIcs.ECOOP.2016.14, author = {J\"{a}rvi, Jaakko and Parent, Sean}, title = {{One Way to Select Many}}, booktitle = {30th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2016)}, pages = {14:1--14:26}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-014-9}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2016}, volume = {56}, editor = {Krishnamurthi, Shriram and Lerner, Benjamin S.}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2016.14}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-61080}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2016.14}, annote = {Keywords: User interfaces, Multi-selection, JavaScript} }
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