Re: Styling form control elements

On 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.

I think there are simple cases we can address like changing the color of placeholder text, etc...

>> 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.

Agreed.

On Dec 5, 2013, at 1:42 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Dec 2013, Ryosuke Niwa wrote:
>> On Dec 5, 2013, at 8:49 AM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>> On the other hand, this still doesn't tell UA whether it should be 
>> ignoring the binding on a given platform or not (i.e. it doesn't address 
>> the device-specific UI control use case).
> 
> Yeah. I don't know of a way to fix that.

Indeed, this is a hard problem.  My point was simply that using shadow DOM or custom element wouldn't magically solve this problem.

> The problem you're worried about is one that we _do_ have today on mobile 
> devices with sites that aren't designed with mobile devices in mind, just 
> not particularly for form control styling. For example, page widths, input 
> events, all kinds of things like that, make Web pages break on mobile, or 
> look bad on mobile.
> 
> Any solution we come up with for the general problem should, in theory, be 
> able to solve the problem for this specific subcase too.

Agreed.

>> On the other hand, using CSS for binding shadow DOM has a culprit that 
>> instantiation & life-cycle of such shadow DOM becomes a tricky issue.  
>> i.e. spec'ing exactly when those shadow DOM bind & unbind would be 
>> tricky.
> 
> Yes. But we shouldn't shy away from hard problems. ;-)


Agreed.  Perhaps you could write a spec for us? ;)

- R. Niwa

Received on Friday, 6 December 2013 04:12:35 UTC