Hypernym for "radio button" and "checkbox"? [closed]

Question

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

Since I'm coding a shared css class for radio buttons and checkboxes, I would like to word it with the appropriate hypernym.

Kind regards

Answer 1

I suggest one of the following words.

• choice
• selection

"choice", because whether the user is checking a box, unchecking a box, or choosing one item in a radio button list, they are clearly making a choice. A proprietary programming language used the term "choicelist" for a list with multiple check boxes.

"selection", because Google's Material Design web site calls check boxes and radio buttons "selection controls".

Answer 2

Looking back at the World Wide Web Consortium's XForms specification (XForms 1.1, 2009; XForms 2.0, 2012), radio buttons and drop-down lists that allow only one choice are renderings of a select1 element, and check boxes and drop-down lists that allow more than one choice are renderings of a select element. (Most people don't know how to make multiple selections from a drop-down lists, but both XForms and HTML forms support this.)

So if the hypernym that is being requested here can also cover drop-down lists, I would suggest "select control" or "selection control".

Answer 3

I've used quite a few GUI frameworks and libraries, and usually they're most commonly called: widgets

List of common generic widgets
Widget toolkits

Typically, users interact with information by manipulating visual widgets that allow for interactions appropriate to the kind of data they hold.
Graphical User Interface

It's true that the name will vary among different GUI frameworks/libraries/systems. In two of the most popular frameworks, Qt and wxWidgets, as well as nearly every other GUI library I've used calls them widgets. It's true that in technical parlance "control element" may be used." But if you search around I'm pretty sure you'll find them being more often referred to as widgets.

Comparison of GUIs and widgets supported

In Windows they're generally called controls.

Controls Button
ComboBox
Date and Time Picker
Edit
List box Progress Bar
Scroll Bar
Status Bar
Toolbar
Tooltip
Trackbar

Windows documentation

If you do a search for GUI control it will most likely bring you results for "widget"

HTML is the only place I know of where they're referred to as elements. But I have a feeling that's because it's a markup language where nearly everything is an element.

widget
3. Computers a. An element of a GUI, such as a text box or button, that displays information or settings that can be entered or altered by the user.
American Heritage Dictionary

It's true you won't find this definition in many dictionaries, but I searched for "control" and didn't find anything of the sort. There's no doubt in my mind that they're now most popularly called widgets, though I'm not sure exactly when this happened. All I know is that the word widget was used much earlier than in a computer GUI context. It's been generally used as a placeholder name to mean a "thing.".

If "widget" runs the risk of being misunderstood, then "GUI widget" is a lot clearer.

Edit: I may have misunderstood the question, if you want a word that means either selection box or radio button but doesn't include all the other widgets, then I'd struggle to find a word. As far as I know the difference between a radio button and a checkbox is that you can check multiple checkboxes but only one radio button. The checking of either of these two may be "selection", which Chris Wolfe has already in his answer, or "toggling", as you're marking on and off. Technically toggling might be incorrect because some selection boxes might have three states, not just on or off. Oh, I'm confused.