The word toggle comes from the idea of a pin passed through the eye of a rope to hold it in place. It’s still used for this purpose, but the phrase has also come to mean any kind of up-and-down switch, like a light switch or an elevator button. It’s this meaning that applies to the toggle element, which is a HTML tag for showing and hiding content.

The best use of toggles is to give users a control over the amount of information presented on pages. They can hide large amounts of text, tables and images, minimizing scrolling, or they can display as much content as the user needs to get their job done. This can also be a way to minimize clicks, such as with a single toggle that opens a large amount of content rather than multiple smaller ones.

Feature Toggle

Feature toggles are an important tool for modern software development, and they can be used to make your website more accessible. However, it is important to understand how they work before you start using them. A toggle is a feature that is enabled or disabled in your codebase, and it can be triggered by various conditions. These can range from fitness tests generated by other features in your codebase to a setting provided by a management system.

Toggles can be very confusing for some users, especially if they aren’t properly labeled. It is essential to make sure that toggle labels clearly indicate what will happen if the toggle is turned on, and they should use visual cues such as movement and color to reinforce this message. Moreover, the toggle should look like a slider rather than a simple checkbox or radio button to avoid confusion and meet accessibility requirements for people with vision impairments.

Lastly, it is important to use toggles sparingly to prevent cognitive overload. Too many toggles can cause users to become overwhelmed and confused, which will negatively impact their experience on your website. Using too many toggles can also make your site slow to load, which will be frustrating for visitors and potentially damaging to your business.

Feature toggles are an excellent tool for supporting agile development practices by giving your team the ability to write new features on separate branches without blocking out trunk code. It is important to use them carefully and follow best practices, but they can be very useful for ensuring that your product remains stable and usable while developers work on new features. This is a key difference between using toggles and more traditional waterfall development approaches, which require your teams to perform a lengthy testing process before the release of the finished feature. This can lead to long delays before your team can bring new features to market. This is not always possible in a fast-paced software environment, but by using feature toggles, your teams can continue to work on new features while keeping them hidden from the end user until they are ready for release.