A lot of sites offer the ability to edit lists of items inline as well as allowing multiple items to be selected via checkboxes and have an action performed all at once e.g. delete, mark as spam etc.

But how do you implement this without violating html rules. I need one form for the checkboxes with individual submit_tags for the mass actions. But after a user clicks on an item in the list, another form via Ajax will be inserted within the checkbox form.

How do I avoid doing this? I'm using rails and jQuery.