[coffeefirst]

No, it’s because it’s stupid difficult to replicate the native functionality exactly, retain accessibility traits, and if you get it perfect, then you have to deal with the fact that different browsers and devices interpret these controls totally differently.

[Spivak]

We’re saying the same thing. The web right now today requires that you reimplement all that functionality from scratch when it should be just inheriting all the behavior from the native control in your custom thing and tweaking the styles or adding some additional functionality.

[goatlover]

This. You should be able to subclass the DOM creation functions to specify your customized version, and have it spit out the custom tag for it.