One Way to Select Many.

Selecting items from a collection is one of the most common tasksusers perform with graphical user interfaces. Practically everyapplication supports this task with a selection feature differentfrom 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 wouldclearly be useful. As a consequence, user effort is wasted. Theloss of productivity is experienced in small doses, but allcomputer users are impacted. The undesirable state of supportfor multi-element selection prevails because the same selectionfeatures are redesigned and reimplemented repeatedly. Thisarticle seeks to establish common abstractions formulti-selection. It gives generic but precise meanings toselection operations and makes multi-selection reusable; aJavaScript implementation is described. Application vendorsbenefit because of reduced development effort. Users benefitbecause correct and consistent multi-selection becomes availablein more contexts.