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by dpcx 439 days ago
This looks like what web developers have been waiting literally decades for. Possibly replacing (eventually) a bunch of JS libraries to make this all do what we want.

I don't have Chrome installed, but I'm curious how it handles multi-select fields, as I didn't see that in the example video.
2 comments
dqv 439 days ago
I just tried it in the Codepen and it reverts to a regular old UI element when it has the multiple attribute.

Also just tried it with multiple="multiple" just in case. Same behavior.

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no_wizard 439 days ago
Huge miss in my opinion. If it doesn’t support all scenarios I’m not sure what the Chrome team is thinking here
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kelnos 439 days ago
I expect they're thinking they should ship something that works, and covers some use cases, and gradually improve it over time to support more use cases.

Y'know, like how most software development works.

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8n4vidtmkvmk 439 days ago
They've screwed this up several times by shipping too soon and then having to backpedal. The web is not something you want to screw up because they don't own every website in existence.
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dqv 439 days ago
I was just wondering how people do a custom <select multiple> now. I guess they make it screen-reader-only and then have aria-hidden checkboxes for everyone else.
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sureIy 439 days ago
"Select multiple" is just a list of checkboxes. The missing part (which is also missing from select) is just the filtering.

I am not holding my breath for a decent "select multiple" field. It's been the same crap for decades and browsers could have fixed it long again without waiting for spec - it's just a "replaced element", but they don't care.

The fun part is that it looks amazing on Safari iOS (and QED it's rendered as a list of checkboxes)

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mjrpes 439 days ago
I commented on this a few weeks ago. There are two future components under development that look to support selecting multiple options in a dropdown format.

Search textbox: would be supported under the more customizable Combobox element

Select Multiple: both the Enhanced Select and Combobox plan to support this

Combobox: https://open-ui.org/components/combobox.explainer/

Enhanced Select: https://open-ui.org/components/customizableselect/

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TimTheTinker 439 days ago
> "Select multiple" is just a list of checkboxes.

Not necessarily. I've seen more than one production app with a custom filtering dropdown list of items with checkboxes.

I built a couple variants of that in React at my last gig for the company's design system. The keyboard nav was complex... that component is one of the work artifacts that I'm most proud of.

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sureIy 439 days ago
> custom filtering dropdown

I already said that. "Select" is not filterable in the browser already, so `select[multiple]` has no chance of seeing that in this decade.

However you slice/style it, it's just checkboxes (that you can filter/reorder)

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pests 439 days ago
Incremental improvement?

Why release anything right?

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no_wizard 439 days ago
Incremental improvement is great, but I do want to know what they're thinking here.

They didn't mention it in the blog post that multiple isn't supported. Its perfectly fine if it is not supported right now. It would be great if they acknowledged that up front to set expectations accordingly.

For instance, if its explicitly not supported, then I won't be left wondering if its a bug or a misunderstanding of the implementation etc.

Communication would be really good here. I'm all for incremental improvement, I think we need more of it.

Doesn't mean there shouldn't be better communication about it.

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pests 439 days ago
In the original dev blog from last year they mention it’s still a work in progress.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/rfc-customizable-select

> Note: The multiple and size attributes on select (<select multiple> and <select size=n>) are not supported in appearance: base-select yet.

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no_wizard 439 days ago
From last year while it was a WIP

and now this as of Chrome 135 is shipped, and they didn't think it wise to include a back reference to this post, calling out what isn't supported?

They can and should communicate this is all.

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zachrip 439 days ago
That really sucks :/
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Contax 439 days ago
> This looks like what web developers have been waiting literally decades for.

Count me in. Most times it didn't matter to me but there were some cases when I wanted or needed them to have a specific style matching other elements and, yes, I could only do it -to the best I knew- with JS.

Let's see if it becomes widely supported.

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