Standardizing 'select': What the future holds for HTML - Stephanie Stimac @ FrontendNE

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Standardizing : What the future holds for HTML Controls

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Hi! I’m Stephanie. Program Manager for Microsoft Edge Developer Experiences @seaotta

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Hi! I’m Stephanie. Designer Front-end developer Dev and Designer Advocate @seaotta

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Designer Developer

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Mock up Code

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HTML Controls

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Standardizing The Past: why HTML Controls are the way they are The Present: where we’re at now The Future: what’s to come with HTML Controls (select!)

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Some History HTML Form Controls

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1995

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1995

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1995

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1995

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Pre- 1995 1.0

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Pre- 1995 1.0

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The primary focus of the specification draft was to capture common HTML practice in web browsers as of June 1994. http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/history/html20.html

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WorldWideWeb (Nexus) ViolaWWW Erwise MidasWWW MacWWW Mosaic Cello Lynx 2.0 Arena AMosaic 1.0 IBM WebExplorer Netscape Navigator SlipKnot 1.0 MacWeb Ibrowse Agora (Argo) Minuet Web Browsers 1991-1994 Wikipedia

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1995

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1995

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1995

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CSS IS AWESOME

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CSS IS AWESOME 1997

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1999 4.01 CSS IS AWESOME ❤

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1995

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https://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200409/styling_form_controls/

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.form { -webkit-appearance: value; -moz-appearance: value; appearance: value; }

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Recap Pre-1995: Lots of browsers pop up 1994: HTML 1.0 draft expires 1995: HTML 2.0 becomes standardized spec Basic HTML form controls standardized No standard for styling Operating system dependency 1997: CSS Supported by HTML 3.20 not fully embraced by browsers 1999: CSS Supported by HTML 4.01 embraced by more browsers

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1999 – present

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The Current State of Styling Native Controls

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It’s not bad…

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But it’s not great either.

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Feasibility of Styling Form Controls with CSS

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Text-field () Buttons Feasibility of Styling Form Controls with CSS Can be styled with few problems

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Text-field () Buttons Checkboxes Radios Feasibility of Styling Form Controls with CSS Can be styled with few problems Can be styled with complex CSS and hacks

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Text-field () Buttons Checkboxes Radios Color picker Date controls Dropdown widgets Range File picker Feasibility of Styling Form Controls with CSS Can be styled with few problems Can be styled with complex CSS and hacks Good night and good luck.

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Browser Inconsistencies

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Browser Inconsistencies Chrome EdgeHTML Firefox Safari

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No extensibility

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Dribbble: Jordan Ranson

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Dribbble: Mark Hendriks Dribbble: Seb kay

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What do developers really want?

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Do they really want better form controls?

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Initial Research 1400 respondents

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Initial Research: Demographics Full results: https://aka.ms/controls-survey

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Initial Research: Demographics Full results: https://aka.ms/controls-survey

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Top 10 Re-created Form Controls Full results: https://aka.ms/controls-survey

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Reasons Controls Are Created Full results: https://aka.ms/controls-survey

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JSConfEU Survey Which form control gives you the most frustration? Why?

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JSConfEU Survey Which form control gives you the most frustration?

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JSConfEU Survey Why?

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“ Requires hacky tricks

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“ Can’t style elements at all to the extent we need to

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Too little control over styling across popular browsers “

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…but the amount of work it takes to implement an accessible alternative with complete feature parity is massive. “

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How painful is it?

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ImportantTM Research

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Clearly, there is an issue

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The Future

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✨

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HTML isn’t done

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New Styles & Accessibility Improvements

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Chromium Controls Visual Refresh

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New Native Components

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New native components

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New native components https://aka.ms/virtual-scroller https://aka.ms/toggle-switch

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From proposal to standard 1. Proposal incubates in the WICG 2. After incubation, multi-implementer interest is required before graduating to an HTML standard

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Tell other implementers what you want! 1. @mozhacks on Twitter 2. Mozilla Firefox Platform Status: https://github.com/ mozilla/platform-status 3. @webkit on Twitter 4. WebKit Platform Status: https://webkit.org/status/

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Fixing the current problems with controls

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Form controls and their parts aren’t standardized

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How do you standardize a control?

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Open UI https://open-ui.org/

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Open UI’s Mission Maintain an open standard for UI and promote its adherence and adoption.

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Goals of Open UI • Document component names as they exist today • Define a common language for describing UIs and design systems • Eventual browser standards for web app components • Converging designer processes and developer workflows

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Standardizing controls and components is hard…

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Open UI People who work on design systems Web platform engineers +

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Investigations: Peeling open

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aka.ms/select-ou Select Working Draft

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aka.ms/open-ui Open UI Website

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aka.ms/open-ui Add a design system Open UI Website

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aka.ms/open-ui Add a design system Provide feedback

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We need you!

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We need you! • Provide feedback on the current HTML Control prototypes that Chrome has • Contribute to the form control investigations on Open UI • Tell browser vendors what you need from your form controls

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Follow these folks • @stubbornella – Google Chrome PM • @gregwhitworth – Microsoft Edge PM • @seaotta – Microsoft Edge PM

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We’re here to listen…

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…because these improvements are for you.

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Thank you! https://noti.st/seaotta @seaotta ststimac@microsoft.com