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by zerocrates 1764 days ago
I really wish we'd gotten a couple more useful native controls back when there was any will to add that kind of stuff... It's sad/annoying to see all this reimplementation of simple stuff like comboboxes, and then all this extra effort to make it work OK in different form factors... The great experience of the select element that just gets you a mobile appropriate native UI for free is unavailable for so many simple cases.

Last I checked the form additions from HTML5 were still pretty spotty in support, several don't really have a real world use case, and nobody wants to make any more really.
2 comments
amelius 1764 days ago
The "problem" with native controls is that they might visually clash with the design of your website. That's why everybody implements their own controls or uses libraries like jQuery. And sadly, that's probably why we don't have good default controls.
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zozbot234 1764 days ago
> The "problem" with native controls is that they might visually clash with the design of your website.

CSS can fix that once good native controls are implemented.

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rhdunn 1764 days ago
That requires the ability to style things like the dropdown of the combobox (e.g. to add rounded corners, change the background/border colour), and the rows for each items (e.g. adding padding, and divider border styling). At the moment, that is difficult because they are not part of the HTML box model. And what about styling controls like date input or colour pickers?

Another issue is styling checkboxes to use custom images for the different states (including hover and pressed styling).

The CSS UI spec (https://www.w3.org/TR/css-ui-4) doesn't detail any of that, and the WHATWG HTML spec only defines the values of input fields (e.g. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#the-input-element), not what parts of things like a date control are available and how to style them.

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nikanj 1764 days ago
People use JS to implement basic things like scrolling a page, usually resulting in a experience that’s uniformly worse than the native one would be
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Pxtl 1764 days ago
I have trouble seeing this as a problem, especially with electron and other local web-tech stacks.

I miss the days when clickable things looked clickable.

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pbowyer 1764 days ago
> I really wish we'd gotten a couple more useful native controls back when there was any will to add that kind of stuff...

We're trying, and we need help: https://open-ui.org/

Come say Hi on Discord, anyone who has written a JS control has input that the project needs.

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