The <select> element can now be customized with CSS

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...

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.

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.

The prevalence of JS and JS backed components is due to the reluctance of browser vendors to introduce new HTML elements that everyone has been lobbying for in the same time period.

By and large browser vendors for the longest time, even today still in many respects, repeatedly ignore pleas for more elements that cover common use cases.

Even when they do arrive, they can be half baked - like dialog or details / summary - and that doesn’t help matters

You can't make enough HTML elements to make everyone happy. This was the wrong idea from the start.