LEGEND - Fieldset Caption

The LEGEND element defines a caption for form controls grouped by the FIELDSET element. The LEGEND element must be at the start of a FIELDSET, before any other elements.

While the LEGEND element is not widely supported by current browsers, it can still be used safely if a block-level element immediately follows the LEGEND. Combined with careful use of FIELDSET, this will cause non-supporting browsers to render the caption as its own paragraph. Elements such as STRONG, B, and BIG could also be used to help express the meaning of LEGEND to non-supporting browsers.

An example follows:

<FIELDSET>
  <LEGEND ACCESSKEY=C>Credit Card Information</LEGEND>
  <P>
    <LABEL ACCESSKEY=V>
      <INPUT TYPE=radio NAME=card VALUE=visa> Visa
    </LABEL>
    <LABEL ACCESSKEY=M>
      <INPUT TYPE=radio NAME=card VALUE=mc> MasterCard
    </LABEL>
    <BR>
    <LABEL ACCESSKEY=N>
      Number: <INPUT TYPE=text NAME=number>
    </LABEL>
    <BR>
    <LABEL ACCESSKEY=E>
      Expiry: <INPUT TYPE=text NAME=expiry>
    </LABEL>
  </P>
</FIELDSET>

LEGEND's ACCESSKEY attribute, used throughout the preceding example, specifies a single Unicode character as a shortcut key for giving focus to the LEGEND, allowing the user to quickly jump to a group of form controls. Entities (e.g. é) may be used as the ACCESSKEY value.

More Information

• LEGEND in W3C HTML 4.0 Recommendation

Copyright © 1998 by Liam Quinn. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).