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Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

The problem that I fear is that most of this work will go to waste since it is difficult to apply your own custom styles to the default experience for most input types. Instead of having to reinvent a date picker for every project I would love to be able to use the built in types, but they are usually too inflexible or have made suboptimal aesthetic choices. Is it too much to ask to be able to style a <select>, increase the size of the date picker, or to add animated stripes to a progress meter? I want it to be easy to make the web both beautiful and accessible but am glad for the slow and steady progress.

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I understand how that could be frustrating, but as a user I find styled form elements pretty annoying.

I would love to have control for myself (i.e. be able to customize Chromium's built-in date picker that gets used everywhere), and limit (or prevent) sites from customizing it themselves. I feel like I have a better understanding of what's usable for myself than an arbitrary web dev.

But I also feel it's wishful thinking. Maybe Opera would have done something like that back in the day when they made their own browser, but I'm not hopeful it'll get into Chrome or Firefox any time soon.

Some people are saying “user styles let you do this”, but it’s not actually true: take a textarea, for example; if you set its background-color, the browser discards its regular textarea appearance (which might have a special border colour and style and radius) and leaves you with what’s actually specified. Expressed very approximately, adjusting various properties implies `appearance: none`.

And you can’t get it back. `background-color: initial`? Nope, no native appearance. `appearance: textarea !important`? No go. `background-color: f(env(x))` (a stupid way of getting a runtime-invalid value due to a bad spec, see https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/3792 for details)? Nada.

You could provide your own styles for form elements, but you can’t use user styles to retain native form element styling.

Same with fonts, and colors, and text size, and scroll behavior, and on and on. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, web sites published hyperTEXT and the user agent (browser) operating on behalf of the user, rendered the page according to the user's preferences. I remember how cool it was to configure it so every web site rendered in white text over a brick wall background! Slowly browsers added HTML tag after tag and CSS to give more and more layout and visual control over to the web site publisher and less to the user. Today, stylistic user preferences are a relic of the past, as browsers have given everything away to the publisher.

I agree it's wishful thinking. Sadly, web publishers have gotten used to all this control and expect the browser to be some kind of pixel-perfect renderer like Photoshop, and there's no push from end users to have this kind of user configurability anymore.

css was designed for that exact use case. your user styles can override the developer's (and the browser's) styles on a per-site basis.

so what the parent wishes for is what you should be wishing for too (that is, to be able to style all form controls).

> your user styles can override the developer's (and the browser's) styles on a per-site basis.

Too bad Mac Safari is the only browser of significance that still has an interface to load a user style sheet.

Yes, other browsers have extensions for using them including separate ones for separate sites but how many people really want to create and manage those, especially on mobile?

CSS was designed for that in the late 90s when css barely (?) did any layout. That isn’t really true anymore however

Post author here

Totally hear you on the need to make the elements styleable. That's the next phase of work that's being undertaken, specifically starting with <select>. Take a look at the talk that's linked from the article for a more in-depth explanation of the future phases.

Some nice updates but I admit I was just skipping down to the part where I could style them. For developers, there’s little we can do with this. You’ve changed them. They are better but imagine devs will get a whole lot more excited when we can more easily visually bend them to the needs of our projects/apps. Do you have a vague idea when that should be?

I think it is great that they are working on the default styles. Browser stylesheets feel almost as if they were frozen in time to the point where you realistically have to overwrite them.

My hope would be that one day the default styles are so good that it is an option again to not overwrite them.

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