Question

I’m building a form in ASP.NET to send an email. So far things work great and I’m able to pass my ASP:TextBox contents to the email without any issue. Right now how I’ve done things is put in static text as the TB label and then follow it up with a TB control for the input.

Should I be using the ASP:Label control instead?

Code example:

<div>
Pub Contact Phone: <asp:TextBox ID="PublicationContactPhone" runat="server" TabIndex="9"></asp:TextBox>
</div>

Is there a form best practice that says to have all the non-input text as labels or is it preference?

Answer 1

This sounds like maybe a mixup of the ASP.NET <asp:Label> control and the HTML <label> element. For building forms it’s a good practice to use the HTML <label> for an input label so that clicking on the label will give the input element focus, you can implement a label two ways:

1. place static text and input in the label together (ex. <label>A TextBox <input id="txtbox1" type="text" /></label>)
2. place static text in the label and set a for attribute on the label to the id of the input (ex. <label for="txtbox1">A TextBox</label> <input id="txtbox1" type="text" />)

---

So you can markup your page like so and the text Pub Contact Phone: will be clickable to give focus to the input

<div>
    <label>
        Pub Contact Phone: 
        <asp:TextBox ID="PublicationContactPhone" runat="server" TabIndex="9" />
    </label>
</div>