[chuckadams]

Anything doing server-side work is going to have to be at least somewhat custom. The main problem is there isn't a standard "combobox" at all to speak of: we're still mostly stuck with the same carved-in-stone widget set from Mosaic, whereas native toolkits were more inventive even in the late 80s. Where's Athena's 2d panner widget, for example?

I didn't read any satire in the article at all, it just laid out all the built-in behaviors that a proper button has, and how much work it is to reimplement all of them. Something declarative and CSS-like would have been ideal for customizing elements, but instead we got the half-assed Custom Elements API and the completely different DX atrocity that is Web Components.

I can't really fault Custom Elements too much though, it's an imperfect API for an imperfect DOM and it's better than waiting forever for perfection. But I don't extend the same generosity to the Web Components spec.

[panny]

>The main problem is there isn't a standard "combobox" at all to speak of

But there is. You'll be so happy to learn about datalist today,

https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml5_d...

[6510]

It use to work but chrome on android shows the datalist items as a horizontal scrollable row above the keyboard (useless) and ignores input (even more useless) on windows it shows the datalist as a scrollable popup (confusing?) and ignores input (useless) while firefox on android completely ignores datalist and on windows you have to click the input twice to have the initial list show up.

It took forever but safari mobile got it right.

Extra fun to be had if you attempt to dynamically update the list.

Conclusion: utter garbage, stay away from it.

I just typed this by hand (lol) in 3-4 minutes:

https://jsfiddle.net/tjc4mpxe/

This is what we are waiting for? This is what is taking so long for browsers to support?

[ezekiel68]

I imagine the commenter was referring to the article title wrt satire.

[chuckadams]

Fair enough, I'd call it "homage" perhaps.