One Way to Select Many

Abstract

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.