Old fashioned html option lists

[rwales1000]

Traditional option lists limit the user to typing the first character when selecting. Why not offer type ahead? This would be a major step forwards for this vintage web control.

[tophf]

AFAIK, the <select> dropdown is shown as a native OS control, so the browser can't change its behavior without hooking into the OS internals, which is fragile and not even possible on all platforms. The long-term solution would be to implement such controls in the browser, which would solve a lot of long-standing problems inherent to the platform implementation, which was based on UX/UI of the '90s when these controls where introduced.

Related: #11.

[maniatoffl]

I always wondered , How come we are not able to customize the view of heavily used select dropdown. This leaves majorly two options.

1. Go with browser's default option (Mostly Designer won't be ok with that. Also you would have made fully colour full web page but still have to live up with default size and coloured select options)

2. Go for librayYouUse-select. (Ex. react-select) component where you can customize the styles. Internally this select dropdown created with the help of div elements with javascript . Which is not recommended as per accessibility best practices.

As you can see , Both the options has cons. Would be better If we get this sorted in some way.

[gsnedders]

@rwales1000 We just opened up for Interop 2023 proposals yesterday, see https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/blob/main/2023/README.md for the process and what to expect.

If you're still interested in proposing this, could you resubmit (or edit) this based on the template we now have?

[gsnedders]

Also, from the implementer point-of-view: Safari does support this on macOS today, it will move to the first item matching the string thus far typed. This is likely something we don't really want to standardise, as we likely want to match OS behaviour here to avoid surprising users.

When it comes to more complex alternates, there's also work going on around groups such as Open UI with select elements which are more customisable.

[gsnedders]

Closing this without prejudice; "If you're still interested in proposing this, could you resubmit (or edit) this based on the template we now have?" still holds.