Developer Thought Stream

Recently, I was tasked with creating a slider element for a user to select their credit rating, of which the user can select from among: 'Poor', 'Fair', 'Good', 'Excellent' and 'Not Sure'.  Several problems presented themselves here: A drop-down box would be better, but that's not what the requirements specified. I already have several numeric sliders on my page and I want them all to match. I selected the jQuery noUi Slider library to create the numeric sliders. noUi Slider does not support string values - only numeric values. The "pips" (slider scale/labels) also does not support string values. Since the solution involved shifting my mindset, I wanted to document it here for future reference and maybe to help someone facing the same requirements. Here's my solution: Since there is really no numeric correlation to credit score (especially considering one of the options is "Not Sure"), I will just u