@devnull They definitely are a thing. They’re an abomination :)
They violate the affordance of the control, not to mention conventions and expectations.
A checkbox is either checked or it is not. There is no intermediary indeterminate state. (It can also be disabled.) Ditto for a toggle switch which is modeled on an actual toggle switch; a switch that toggles between two states. If such a switch is stuck in the middle, it’s broken.
@aral ha! As with all abominations sometimes there are places they can be helpful?
I was building out additive permissions in #nodebb when I needed to communicate to the end user that even though a specific privilege was not checked, that in reality, though the additive nature, it may as well have been. (e.g. a particular user group may not have the privilege to post new topics, but if the global registered users group does, then all other groups do too). An indeterminate checkbox was perfect 🤷♂️
@aral ... that it was purely aesthetic (so it didn't muck up the backend), was available as an HTML attribute, and enjoyed full support ... was icing on the cake 🙂
@devnull@aral I think the only valid use case I've seen is when you have a checklist with sub-items, and you need to indicate on the patent that some child items are checked and some are not, but there are probably better ways to do that...
@aral@devnull I saw the screen shot before reading the comment, and my first thought was, "Hurray! At last someone has seen sense and not presumed to provide a default, because this is meant to be a deliberate choice." BTW, my junk box contents includes some physical toggle switches that have a centre off position.
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