Question

Considering the following 2 lines of code (copied from w3schools.com > “HTML < label > for Attribute”):

  <label for="male">Male </label>
  <input type="radio" name="sex" id="male" />

I am having trouble discovering the exact purpose of the above label’s “for” property. As you can see it is currently set to “male” (to match the id of the input control).

All I have read so far is that the above code will ‘associate’ and ‘bound’ the label with the input control.
So my question is, what exactly does this mean?

What exactly are the results of associating the label to the input control?
Does the label and/or input have new behaviours as a result of this ‘association’?

Answer 1

A label that is associated with a control via for will be clickable. Clicking it selects the control. Highly useful with radio/checkboxes in particular. It also has accessibility implications for screen readers for the visually impaired.