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

> On 28Mar, 2016, at 17:45, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

But that is the main pain at the moment!! Having to duplicate code several times to work around illegal selector parsing rules. Please do not underestimate how serious an issue this is because it doesn't address all the problems you want to solve.

> 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.

Then parts that don't make sense are not available in those platforms, just like what happens with the pseudo-elements today. I have not met a single author that considers this a serious problem. They try properties, some work, some don't. They're all struggling with the issue I mentioned above.

> 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

I provided dozens of links in my email, and they come with examples. There really isn't a shortage of examples of styled controls on the Web.

Also, standardizing the components' UI parts will most likely result in the lowest common denominator being the one standardized. Do we really want another Java Swing on the Web? :/

~Lea

Received on Tuesday, 29 March 2016 20:42:21 UTC