Re: Implementor feedback on new elements in HTML5

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Boris Zbarsky<bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
> Tantek Celik wrote:
>> Re: spec on form control styling:
>>
>> http://w3.org/TR/css3-ui
>
> That doesn't address the questions that actually tend to need addressing in
> form control styling, like "how do I style the dropmarker for a combobox"
> (which might not even be present) or "what does the 'vertical-align'
> property actually do when applied to a text input" or "what should the
> 'padding' property do when applied to a checkbox".
>
> It does define a number of interesting features, but doesn't help with the
> problem of it not being clear how existing CSS2.1 features should interact
> with form controls.
>
> So part of the reason progress on CSS3UI is slow is that it's not solving
> the problems that really need to be solving.  In my opinion. It's certainly
> why I personally don't prioritize CSS3UI work higher.

On this aspect we can probably learn a lot from how the js frameworks
style their widgets.  The jQuery UI framework, in particular, leans
heavily on clean, modular CSS that can be shared between widgets
rather than a widget-specific syntax unique to each.  They have the
ThemeRoller tool that is absolutely magical at generating a fairly
small CSS file that alters the display of *all* the UI-module widgets
in a desirable way.

http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/

I personally am too lazy to use anything but the default styles, as
it's usually attractive enough for my purposes anyway.  I'll probably
try my hand at rolling a theme shortly when I add a datepicker widget
to a customer-facing app this week.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 1 September 2009 17:21:16 UTC