It’s now easier than ever to style form controls without sacrificing semantics and accessibility:
The reason is that we can finally style the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements on the
<input>tag itself. This means we can keep and style an<input>and won’t need any extra elements. Before, we had to rely on the likes of an extra<div>or<span>, to pull off a custom design.
The demo is really nice. And best of all, you can wrap all of these CSS enhancements in a feaure query:
Hopefully, you’re seeing how nice it is to create custom form styles these days. It requires less markup, thanks to pseudo-elements that are directly on form inputs. It requires less fancy style switching, thanks to custom properties. And it has pretty darn good browser support, thanks to
@supports.
Every UI control you roll yourself is a liability. You have to design it, test it, ship it, document it, debug it, maintain it — the list goes on.
It makes you wonder why we insist on rolling (or styling) our own common UI controls so often. Perhaps we’d be better off asking: What are the fewest amount of components we have to build to deliver value to our users?
When I was in Amsterdam I was really impressed with the code that Rose was writing and I encouraged her to share it. Here it is: drop this script into a web page with a form to have its values automatically saved into local storage (and automatically loaded into the form if something goes wrong before the form is submitted).
Paul Ford:
The web was born to distribute information on computers, but the technology industry can never leave well enough alone. It needs to make everything into software. To the point that your internet browser is basically no longer a magical book of links but a virtual machine that can simulate a full-fledged computer.
You had me at “beautifully resilient apps with progressive enhancement”.
This is a great clear walkthrough of enhancing a form submission. A lot of this seems like first principles to me, but if you’ve only ever built single page apps, then thinking about a server-submission process first might well be revelatory.
This is an excellent initiate spearheaded by Nicole and Sarah at Google! They want to fund research into important web UI work: accessibility, form controls, layout, and so on. If that sounds like something you’ve always wanted to do, but lacked the means, fill in the form.
A question via email…
A presentation at An Event Apart Chicago 2019.
Why I’d like to see one or two more elements included in the new proposal for styling form controls.
Mobile Safari doesn’t support the min and max attributes on date inputs.
Defining the inputs instead of trying to control the outputs.