For displaying a readonly details views of a certain item on a website, is there a general rule to choose between disabled input fields or labels/plain text?
In this situation, first an overview of orders is shown, and users can click on a single order to see the details of that order. With an edit button they go to yet another screen on which they can edit the order.
Any advice on how to decide between these? Thanks!
Extra info: The details view is an aggregate of all the editable data. Via an edit button per "editable section", the user can navigate to a page where that section is editable with other input controls like autocompleters, treeviews, dropdownlist, ...
Answer
First, bear in mind that a label is not the same than plain text. A label "represents a caption for an item in a user interface", the item normally being a form input.
About if using disabled inputs or plain text, it depends on the workflow for editing the information:
If the edit form is one page away, have the information displayed as "plain text" in its own page.
If the edit form is in the same page, then disabled input fields would be better. The input fields would be activated by toggling an "edit" option.
In both cases, the way of displaying the information conveys the right message to the user: in the first, that "information can't be edited in this page", the second, that "the information can be edited, but you need to activate edition mode".
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