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.