Re: Removal of other semantic elements

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 7:26 AM, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:
> What is needed for this is a detailed compendium of the various possible
> parts that any form control would be comprised of; for example, there were
> some proprietary Microsoft scrollbar-styling properties
> (scrollbar-base-color, scrollbar-track-color, scrollbar-face-color,
> scrollbar-highlight-color, scrollbar-3dlight-color,
> scrollbar-darkshadow-color, scrollbar-shadow-color, scrollbar-arrow-color)
> that I used on one of my earlier sites, and I got a lot of positive comments
> on it.  Naturally, not all UAs would have all the same parts in their own
> controls, but a defining a superset would let designers get at the vast
> majority of them (possibly as pseudo-elements, for ease-of-use with
> selectors).  A good place to start is to look at the various custom controls
> that script libraries define, and see what parts of those are stylable in
> each of those libs.
>
> How much nicer for designers and developers would it be for them to use the
> CSS skills they already have to style their controls than to have to buy
> into one or more custom libraries to build them?
>
> I expect this topic has already been raised (and probably rejected) for an
> addition to CSS.  But I think times have changed, and it's time to reexamine
> some of our basic premises about what CSS should be (and is) used for.  I
> don't see why the browser chrome should be inviolate, when it's such an
> important part of the look-and-feel of a site.

Officially, form controls are "out of scope" for the CSSWG.  But it's
quite obvious that browsers *do* apply CSS to form controls, and there
is some interest in the CSSWG to specify precisely which properties
apply and how.  We still can't get *too* precise about it, because
browsers need the ability to innovate the display and manipulation of
controls on specialized devices (frex, I love Opera Mini's display of
<select multiple> - much better than any display of such on current
desktop browsers!).  But we can certainly do *something* for this.

I suspect I'm out of spec-editing bandwidth for a few months, but I'd
be interested in working on this in the future.

~TJ

Received on Monday, 5 April 2010 15:48:22 UTC