Re: Styling composite elements

Styling select boxes should be a priority. The amount of times in my career I've had to fake these is ridiculous, and you can never adequately meet the intricacies of the real controls. These have existed for years, and we still cannot adequately style them. CSS variables, and such are all well and good, but it doesn't seem like the basics are fixed yet, and we're just inventing new things instead of cleaning house.

How about if there were a standardised version of the select box you can enable via CSS? And if you don't do this, the browser can do whatever it likes? 

Exactly how -webkit-appearance: none; works, in fact.

If the standardised version of the select box had specific elements and behaviours, all written down in a specification then authors could predict those behaviours, and the pseudo-elements Henrick described would be predictably available. If the standardised version were enabled via CSS, then that is a lot less difficult to cope with? If it weren't enabled, the browser could do whatever it wanted.

AK

On 20 Feb 2013, at 21:39, "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 1:30 PM, Antony Kennedy <antony@silversquid.com> wrote:
>> We should be addressing all of these.
>> 
>> I understand that OS controls are those the user is most likely to understand, and the most accessible since they are exposed lower level. Without allowing the authors to style these properly, and consistently, we force them to fake the same result with JS and markup, and then everyone loses.
>> 
>> I agree with Henrick 100%. This is a CSS problem.
>> 
>> Difficulty should not be a reason to avoid getting something standardised and written into a spec.
> 
> Of course it should be.  There's a lot of things to work on, and only
> a finite amount of attention to be spent on all of it.  Difficult
> things need justification for the large amounts of attention they'll
> consume.
> 
> I agree it's a CSS problem, it's just one that we haven't had anyone
> tackle yet.  As I explained, it's a *very* hard problem.
> 
> ~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 20 February 2013 21:47:06 UTC