Hacker News Reader

Comment by beeboobaa | Hacker News Reader

> Ideally developers could let the user know their caps lock key is activated.

That would be up to the User Agent (the browser), not the website.

I dream of a parallel universe where browsers took the lead in crafting innovative UI’s for standard web forms, with things like password prompts behaving intelligently, dropdowns supporting advanced autocomplete, excellent date pickers, caps lock reminders on password dialogs, etc etc.

Websites could have been simple to make with basic markup, leaving UX niceties to the browser vendors.

The world we live in is about as far from that as you get, with the stock UI for <input> elements being about par for 1992 UI toolkits, if even that.

In particular, the input select multiple is atrocious with default styling.

The mobile platforms were a chance to reboot that part, and have browser do a lot more UI wise with custom handling of the different data types (dates, passwords, phone numbers, ranges etc.)

It just didn't pan out to tablets and desktop computers. But it might not be too late ?

> It just didn't pan out to tablets and desktop computers. But it might not be too late ?

Safari has a caps lock indicator on password fields on every platform, and has had it for several years - at least since Safari 12 on macOS 10.12 (circa 2018), possibly longer, but I don't have an older VM to test on.

Gecko has an open feature request for this, from 2 years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1757348

Chromium has an open feature request for this, from 3.5 years ago: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40722752

Well, they're not, which means web developers are picking up the slack.

Stay your lane, and if you really feel the itch go contribute to firefox or something

If you think I'm a front-end developer, you are mistaken. I just empathize with them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you

Ah, so you were merely replying at me, rather than to me.

This is a public forum, we're not DMing

How would the browser know when/how to display the capslock status? It doesn't know what any given web site is doing wrt to keyboard input. Firefox adds a capslock indicator on the text cursor but not all pages use standard input fields. They might use custom UI elements, or no visual elements at all. Some sites may not even care about capslock (e.g. an arcade game).

`<input type='password'`, just like TFA was talking about?

> That would be up to the User Agent (the browser), not the website.

Relevant: Safari has done this for ages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com