Re: Scrollbar CSS representation [Re: Proposal]

Zoltan Hawryluk wrote:

> Things like the shape, size, etc, of the scroll bars I think are infeasible
> for the browser (since the OS would have to be able to handle that, and none
> of them do today, and I can't imagine a lot of them doing that in the
> future), and that I think that scrollbar-shadow-color:,
> scrollbar-3dlight-color:, etc, is *very* OS specific (not all OS's, or
> window managers for that matter, have 3D scrollbars ... nor should they
> required to be).
> 
> And, most importantly, any scroll bar style should be a hint.  The browser
> manufacturer shouldn't be forced to implement it if the OS s/he is
> developing on is unable to do so without bloating the browser itself.
> 


I spend some time making the scrollbars in Mozilla on Mac OS look Mac OS
9 like, so I have a really good appreciation of how hard it is to do
this well with CSS as it stands. As I've said ad naseum, the current
"System Color" model is utterly inadequate to accurately describe most
scrollbars. To underline my point, here's a little image I spend 5
minutes putting together:

http://pixel.recoil.org/scrollbars.png


Any simplistic "3d-shadow" model is going to fail and fail poorly to
capture what's out there. I think there are 3 possibilities:

(1) ignore scrollbars altogether

(2) provide a single "hint" color and allow the OS to tint the scrollbar
to that color )(see especially the 2 Mac scrollbars in the image)

(3) develop a robust, in depth mechanism for both querying the current
look of the system and setting it on elements controlled by CSS.

I wonder if 3 is where we want to go at all... its the old question
about whether CSS is a document styling language or a general purpose UI
styling language. Clearly its the former at present.

-- 
AndyT (lordpixel)

Received on Wednesday, 3 October 2001 10:01:57 UTC