ReadWriteWeb

You got to love a service that starts off their blog with "Typing HTML sucks" when talking about setting up HTML forms. A new service called Ngotha.com is here to help. They provide on-the-fly conversion of any SQL query into a validated Javascript HTML form that looks great. The company estimates that their own UI designers were spending at least half of their time designing user input forms and their service can cut this time down considerably.

The question of how big a form field should be isn't just about how much you can type into the box. It's also about how it looks, and whether the user understands how much they can type in before they hit the end of the box.

If you've ever filled in a form where it's not obvious how much you can type in, it can become a very frustrating experience.

What should you consider when setting up a form for users to fill in?

Google will stop at nothing in its quest to index the world's information. Last year it ate through 100 exabytes of data, but there's still a lot that it can't get access to. Known as the deep web (or hidden web, or invisible web, etc.), it is estimated that the majority of online data is hidden safely from Google's prying eyes -- private intranets, unlinked pages, some non-textual content, and until today dynamic content returned via form input was all inaccessible to the search engine. Google today announced that its Googlebot web crawler would begin to fill out HTML forms and crawl the results.