We don’t actually need it in this example, but we would if we left the border and background as the default. I’ve shown some ways to do that in a few of the examples, but I want to point out this snippet specifically: The golden rule to keep in mind about focus states is that you should always account for it. These include the following elements: Some elements are more difficult to style, requiring more complex CSS or some more specific tricks: We describe how to handle these more specific features in the article Advanced form styling. To style a checkbox, use the following HTML code. This is a simplified version of the example found on the reference page. Got long forms on your website? Firefox settled on this because web developers mostly seemed to be using the -webkit- prefixed version, so it was better for compatibility. Unfortunately, the behavior of this property's original implementations was very different across browsers, making it not very usable. For example, when styling , we can hide the default input and use a custom button. It’s important that this div is a sibling of the input, and because they are both inside the label, the text will serve as the input label, so let’s be sure that it makes sense. The last states to cover are for valid and invalid inputs. We don’t even need a single line of JavaScript or extra HTML elements! Customizing the text that comes in the native UI is not trivial. I’m afraid I can’t pass your toggle switch since it’s not draggable. It boils down to setting the appearance property Chrome to none, and to textfield in Firefox: The select input will be more interesting. We also add a visually-hidden class to make it easier to add some accessible text that isn’t actually displayed. I’ll look at just Firefox and Chrome for now: If that sounds complicated, that’s because it is.
This is an important consideration when designing form elements. The road to nicer forms: useful libraries and polyfills, Chrome browsers no longer use the WebKit rendering engine, Styling Cross-Browser Compatible Range Inputs with CSS, Property compatibility table for form widgets, Assessment: Structuring a page of content, From object to iframe — other embedding technologies, HTML Table advanced features and accessibility, Assessment: Typesetting a community school homepage, What went wrong? I’m won’t be covering the remaining elements. Pankaj Parashar wrote another article for CSS Tricks called “The HTML5 progress element” that’s worth checking out.
Now let's turn our attention to the "ugly" controls — the ones that are really hard to thoroughly style.
Most browsers use a different font family and size for form elements.
The only way to style these elements is to use custom controls, which are created using stylable HTML elements such as div, span, etc. dragenter and dragleave are useful just for toggling some CSS classes so that we can provide some visual feedback. This was discussed in my semantics and my accessibility posts. In the next article, we will see how to handle form widgets which fall into the "bad" and "ugly" categories. In this article, we will see what can be done with CSS to style the types of form control that are more difficult to style — the "bad" and "ugly" categories. 6 min read
Custom controls for form elements are developed for most major JavaScript libraries. The appearance property is key because it is designed to remove a browser’s default styling from an element. 0 shares. Styling Forms is Not Great. Simply put, we remove their borders and backgrounds, and redefine their padding and margin: When one of these fields gains focus, we highlight them with a light grey, transparent, background (it is always important to have focus style, for usability and keyboard accessibility): Now that our text fields are complete, we need to adjust the display of the single and multiple line text fields to match, since they won't typically look the same using the defaults. date inputs and color are far too complicated to add to this article. This handy rule solves the problem above by visually hiding the native input UI, but unlike display: none;, it keeps the element accessible to screen readers and keyboard navigation. However, you cannot style the dropdown (or
The implementation is simple, and there are only a few attributes specific to this element. Elements involved in creating dropdown widgets, including. Let's talk about some specifics of each of these types of control, highlighting difficulties along the way. There are a few events we will need to attach event listeners to: dragover, dragenter, dragleave, and drop. These are elements that have their own browser-provided styles which are tricky to customize. The is semantically correct and has accessibility built in. To give the same size to several different widgets, you can use the box-sizing property along with some consistent values for other properties: In the screenshot below, the left column shows the default rendering of an , , , , input,