While a handful of form controls can be easily styled by CSS, like the button element, most form controls fall into a bucket of either requiring hacky CSS or are still unable to be styled at all by CSS.
Despite form controls no longer taking a style or technical dependency on the operating system and using modern rendering technology from the browser, developers are still unable to style some of the most used form control elements such as
select. The root of this problem lies in the way the specification was originally written for form controls back in 1995.
Stephanie goes back in time to tell the history of form controls on the web, and how that history has led to our current frustrations:
The current state of working with controls on the modern web is that countless developer hours are being lost to rewriting controls from scratch, as custom elements due to a lack of flexibility in customizability and extensibility of native form controls. This is a massive gap in the web platform and has been for years. Finally, something is being done about it.
Amen!
When I was in Amsterdam I was really impressed with the code that Rose was writing and I encouraged her to share it. Here it is: drop this script into a web page with a form to have its values automatically saved into local storage (and automatically loaded into the form if something goes wrong before the form is submitted).
Chris walks through a really good example of an HTML web component he made for NASA: wrapping a regular form element in a custom element to add Ajax functionality.
This approach let me slash the JavaScript used for this project in half, easily progressively enhance the UI, and provide an authoring approach that’s much easier to read and make sense of.
The capture attribute is pretty nifty—and I just love that you get so much power in a declarative way:
<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="environment">
A handy little script from Aaron to improve the form validation experience.
Apparently the sentence forms that I kicked off with Huffduffer are making a comeback.
Some buggy behaviour has been fixed in iOS 18 but now there’s a new bit of weirdness.
A little fix for Safari.
Better UX through better HTML: inputmode, enterkeyhint, and autocomplete.
Science, the web, and user experience.
It should be safe to visit a web page.