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Comment by dham | Hacker News Reader

If W3C would stop doing initiatives like Web USB and give us a way to style a select box (finally going to be a thing) we wouldn't even need web frameworks.

* Styled select boxes

* Good cross platform datepicker with ranges that looks good

* More form validation options / dynamic form validation

* A good drag api that does edge detection well in every browser

* Bring back frames (would allow good nested routing)

* A built in rich text editor

* A good modal API (or bring it back)

* A way to submit a form via AJAX with just a property (think Rails UJS) to just render html.

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Please just give me a checkbox input that sends true/false instead of true/nothing

I agree radio and checkbox inputs are still huge warts in HTML forms, though there is a workaround: if you have a hidden input with the same name and "false" value then you'll get what you want. See here for an example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2697299/

"Web Component" is a great name, but Shadow DOM and Custom Element are terrible APIs. WHATWG should just quietly abandon them and then come up with "Web Components 2.0" based on a native reactivity system, native VDOM diffing, and (this already a thing) CSS layers for style isolation.

People are working on customizable select 1 https://open-ui.org/components/select.research 2 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=112184...

Yes, gotcha. That's why I have in parenthesis

> (finally going to be a thing)

I've been thinking like forever that if we had a standard, pure-html equivalent to jQuery's `$('.foo').load('url...')`, we could have a lot of great sites without any JS at all (I'm not talking about the minority of legit cases where react/vue/angular shines).

Similar to a link targetting an iframe, but without an actually ugly iframe.

Are you familiar with HTMX? Sounds like what you want. I'm not a huge fan, but I think it would be good if something like it were a native capability.

Yes, that's the same core idea. I mean, there are plenty of solutions in JS, and it's a one-liner with fetch anyway, but having a native way would have been cool.

I was thinking about something more like `<a href="..." target="#someDiv">`.

That could be some handy (albeit rudimentary) foundation to build maintainable sites on a static server without any JS or build pipeline.

Styling a radio button, a select box and a slider would be amazing, too.

Now the only option is to replace them which is quite sad.

Yea you're right, that's like the biggest one. Can't believe I forgot that.

Last year they introduced the CSS `accent-color` property: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-ui-4/

I’d like to make them larger and easier to target. It’s trivial to do this for form fields.

> and give us a way to style a select box

How many end-users complained what a select box is not styled?

I hear you, that's another thing that has plagued our industry. Most of the time a regular select box is fine, but sometimes you need to have images or something more in the options (colors, etc)

None, probably, but these days it's de rigeur to spend half a (web or mobile) project's budget making sure even the select boxes are "on brand" and "delightful" or whatever. Often at the expense of usability.

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