Control the Look & Feel of Form Elements with Uniform jQuery Plugin | Hacker News Reader

Control the Look & Feel of Form Elements with Uniform jQuery Plugin

blogupstairs.com

38 pointsyadirosadi8 comments

Uniform is jQuery plugin that could control the look and feel of form elements (checkboxes, drop down menus, radio buttons, file upload inputs and etc..) between all browsers. It works in sync with your real form elements to ensure accessibility and compatibility.

Open articleView on HN

Is this something that anybody actually wants? The form elements are standard in your browser, any user knows immediately what they are. Is theming them a good thing, or just a way to make your web(site|app) "different" than everyone else?

Here is my problem with web browser's default form element: inconsistent in their size. For every browser, the default size of form elements varies a few pixels, and that causes the difference in subsequent layout etc. I guess that is the main reason why you don't normally see much default form elements in popular web applications.

Plus they're ugly. I just added this to a site we're building which has a large focus on a form. The professional look of the site just skyrocketed.

My favorite is when the same person complains that some browser doesn't use stock widgets in the content of the page because it makes the app not look "native" enough, and then goes and styles them making them look totally different.

I've rarely had much luck with theming the browser widgets beyond custom submit-buttons.

There's always a browser not playing ball, always situations where the CSS magic interferes with the surrounding layout, always issues with dynamically generated or loaded content (unstyled by default unless you run the magic again on callback).

All of the issues can be work-arounded. Been there, done that. Not recommended.

Not to be confused with Uni-Form, the "framework" for HTML forms which serves a slightly different purpose.

http://sprawsm.com/uni-form/

Does it use jQuery UI theme support? I've been waiting for jQuery UI to finish cloning all of the HTML form elements for some time. This could be a nice bridge.

I've been waiting for the exact same thing, myself. I was just saying to a friend the other day how nice it would be to be able to style select boxes and file inputs with jQuery UI (and how I wish it had a color picker widget so I wouldn't have to use a separate one, but that's another post entirely).

From what I can gather just by looking at the site, it doesn't look like it supports jQuery UI themes, but the theme CSS for Uniforms looks fairly small and not too terribly involved, so it shouldn't be hard to modify it to match your chosen UI theme.

This is definitely one I'm going to keep my eye on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com