[whatwg] Styling form controls (Was: Re: Forms-related feedback)

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 3 Dec 2013, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> > > 
> > > Additionally, replacing the rendering rather than styling it is 
> > > hostile towards new platforms. If everyone had used Shadow-DOM to 
> > > build their own rendering for <select>s that would have made the 
> > > transition to mobile much more painful since you'd get a tiny custom 
> > > <select> UIs rather than a more platform-appropriate picker.
> >
> > Well, there's not much that can be done about that, as far as I can 
> > tell.
> 
> Allowing targeting parts of the built-in UI using pseudo-elements would 
> go a long way. I.e. having a ::options-box pseudo-element as well as 
> other pseodu elements for other components of common implementations.
> 
> This way the UA could ignore the style properties that it can't 
> implement or that doesn't make sense for its UI.

Yeah, agreed. Again, with XBL2, the goal was to define some default 
bindings (in abstract, not concretely) that user agents were supposed to 
default to, and those bindings would specify pseudos that specific 
subparts mapped to (XBL2 had an xbl:pseudo attribute for this). You can 
actually see the remnants of this in the HTML spec's rendering section, 
where the widgets are defined in terms of the 'binding' property.


> > > And then there's of course the separate-but-related issue of being 
> > > able to style scrollbars, which is another reason websites create 
> > > sea-of-divs pages today. The reason this is related is that the 
> > > challenges styling form controls isn't really related to form 
> > > controls, but rather related to styling of UA-provided UI. 
> > > Scrollbars is another such UI.
> >
> > Right. We never developed this very far, but with XBL2 the idea was 
> > that we'd eventually let you override the binding of a '::scrollbox' 
> > pseudo, or some such.
> 
> A scrollbar consists of multiple pieces, so you'll need more pseudo 
> elements. But yes, I think this is the right direction.

Yeah, the idea is you'd bind to the scroll box to change the whole scroll 
UI, but you could also then override specific pseudos of the scroll box to 
style subparts of the default (or custom) scrollbox UI. This part was 
never very well developed though since the core of XBL2 was never picked 
up. But I think the same approach should probably still work with the 
newer Web components work, no? It needs to be specified and implemented...

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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