Given that there is no logically default animal from the list of animals below, what should be the “Default Value” below, according to best practice?

<label for=”animal”>Animal (required):</label>
<select name…

I’m trying to build a visual web interface where users can distribute a budget over some (varying) number of items. For example, if the budget is 100 points, I might allocate:

50 points to ‘Apples’
50 points to ‘Oranges’

…

Do progressive images give a better user experience for browser based web applications?

When you have a form with fields and captions for these fields, should you do it like that:

Field1: [                       ]
Field2: [                       ]

or like that:

Field1  [                       ]
Field2  [                       ]

I saw both used in popular application. Microsoft generally uses colons (My computer properties -> Computer Name tab is one example). Opera browser doesn’t use colons as separators on forms (example: Preferences form).

I personally don’t have a strong opinion on which one is better. But I’m working on this “1000s of winforms” app where I suspect we have forms with and without colons so I would really like to set a standard and go one way or another on all forms because the inconsistency is far worse than any of the options.

Is there any research out there showing whether or not alternating the row colors for a table increases/impedes the time it takes to parse information? An example can be found at the following location:

I generally find i…