Re: [css-forms][css-ui] Styling native components, a proposal

Unfortunately, this proposal mostly only addresses the syntax side of
styling form controls, which isn't a huge deal.  Moving from the
existing specialized pseudo-elements to a single functional
pseudo-element with specialized keywords is a fairly trivial change;
the main thing it accomplishes is to let us sidestep the broken
unrecognized-selector behavior.

This doesn't, however, address the actual problems inherent in styling
form controls, which is that they constitute a varied and changing set
of displays which don't seem to be amenable to arbitrary styling in
general.  The same inputs can have drastically different styling
across platforms, and can change styling between versions of the same
platform, and the "pieces" can have appearances which can't be easily
tweaked via normal CSS properties.

We talked about this in the existing Forms spec that fantasai and I
wrote to start working on this: <https://drafts.csswg.org/css-forms/>.
Without an actual fix for these issues, we're just shuffling the
existing problems around, which doesn't accomplish much.  We'd love to
get more examples of UIs, and get browser implementors interested in
solving this, but right now this continues to be low-priority,
unfortunately. :/

~TJ

Received on Monday, 28 March 2016 21:46:37 UTC