Re: Styling form control elements

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Dec 2013, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>
>> I think both are issues. I.e. I think we have two separate use cases:
>>
>> 1. Enable using the built-in rendering of form controls, but style them
>> using author-supplied CSS.
>>
>> 2. Enable completely replacing the rendering of form controls
>>
>> I think 1 is *really* hard. Maybe hard enough that we can't do it. But I
>> think it would help the web a lot if we could pull it off, so I think we
>> should try.
>>
>> And I think is=... is the wrong solution for 2. As is wrapping the
>> control with custom elements. You should be able to attach a replacement
>> style using CSS. This is what decorators is, which so far no one is
>> working on afaict.
>
> Agreed.
>
> I think #1 is easier than it looks, though. My vision for doing this would
> be to define some pseudo-elements we say a browser can provide, explained
> as the browser using some default binding that declares those pseudo-
> elements (thought obviously behind the hood it doesn't need to be done
> that way). Obviously there's a limit to how much you can do with just
> this, but I think if we provide sufficient hooks, there needn't be that
> much of a limit.

The tricky part is finding a set of pseudo elements that work across
different UAs, and that give authors enough control that they can
integrate the control with the look-and-feel of their website.

I.e. I'm worried about creating something that is a decent amount of
work to implement, but that in practice doesn't work well enough in
practice that authors can use it as much as we'd like them to.

I don't think it'll work if we simply toss a pile of pseudo elements
into a spec and then hope that implementations validate that it's a
good enough set to solve the use case before they deploy it.

/ Jonas

Received on Friday, 6 December 2013 00:14:14 UTC