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The <select> element can now be customized with CSS

(developer.chrome.com)
497 points tosh | 1 comments | 31 Mar 25 09:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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ljoshua ◴[31 Mar 25 13:38 UTC] No.43534919[source]▶
The challenge till this is widely supported (caniuse.com currently pegs it at 46% globally [1]) will be using this as a progressive enhancement that does not provide a worse or unusable experience for users with browsers not supporting it yet.

In other words, don’t include critical information or functionality in the new styling that isn’t available in the underlying plain select element! But such is always a good practice anyway.

Very nice to see this taking shape though! Should be a huge improvement over the div monster that custom select box replacements often are. :)

[1] https://caniuse.com/mdn-css_properties_appearance_base-selec...

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ddoolin ◴[31 Mar 25 14:36 UTC] No.43535566[source]▶
I agree that this is a huge improvement, but it's also over a decade late IMO. This should've been accomplished well before now, especially given that the issue has been there since the beginning.
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pclmulqdq ◴[31 Mar 25 14:42 UTC] No.43535618[source]▶
Because frontend is frontend, Javascript frameworks dominated the conversation even for silly things like basic web forms for the past 15 years. Basic HTML/CSS is now catching up to the fact that not everyone wants to run a Javascript monstrosity for custom styling on very basic tasks.
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1. hombre_fatal ◴[31 Mar 25 16:29 UTC] No.43536859[source]▶
Forms are hard because they are the most stateful and most ubiquitous UI component that everyone comes in contact with. HTML has a few barebones tools to help you out, but they aren't good enough for the best user experience if you really wanted to polish a form like show errors exactly when you want to show them and only allow submission exactly when you want to allow it and represent error states in much better ways.

It's especially obvious once you're making forms outside of HTML and you realize that it's not any simpler with any less UX consideration. The only thing that changed was the language you're writing that polish in.