Filed under: Tips and tricks, Internet, Graphic Design
Safari 3 allows styled form controls
This was included in WebKit builds beginning several years ago, apparently, but is something I recently stumbled upon. Historically, Safari has been pretty insistent on making sure web page form fields (like drop-down menus and buttons) retain the Aqua look-and-feel. Web designers, on the other hand, have gotten used to choosing colors and font sizes for those controls, so they fit in with their site's design. Hopefully everyone can now be happy: Safari 3 allows web designers to style form controls with CSS. The results are pictured: instead of a glossy, Aqua-like control, Safari displays a matte-finish control in the color and size of your choosing. You can even apply background images to form controls. If you don't apply styles to your controls, then Safari retains the Aqua look.
This shouldn't require any changes to code that's already written for other browsers: Safari 3 should pick right up on the formatting, and display it as the designer intended. It does, however, open up WebKit-specific CSS to your form controls.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
steve said 12:49PM on 5-08-2008
Safari can do that since 3.0 in October 2007 ;-)
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Robert Palmer said 12:53PM on 5-08-2008
I figured it wasn't something totally brand new, but found very little documentation about it online. Thought it could help someone searching in the future (as I was, a month or so ago).
Fritz Laurel said 12:50PM on 5-08-2008
Two words: simply irresistible.
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Robert Palmer said 12:54PM on 5-08-2008
That's what this thread is for: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/05/06/youre-gonna-have-to-face-it/
Get it alllll out of your system. :)
Fritz Laurel said 4:49PM on 5-08-2008
"Have mercy!"
Sorry, I have a "hard head." I know, I know, it's "disturbing behavior." "Your mother should have told you" "it could happen to you." "I didn't mean to turn you on."
"Keep in touch"
p.s. I was going to reply in the other thread, but I thought those 2 words fit better here. Thanks for letting me do this. Okay, I'm done now. :D
Micheal J. said 12:58PM on 5-08-2008
A good example of this when Safari 3.0 came out was that buttons on Flickr (for posting a comment and such) appeared the same as they would in Firefox instead of the Aqua style button.
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Bender Bending Rodriguez said 1:19PM on 5-08-2008
@ Robert Palmer,
If you want to keep up to date on the changes made to WebKit you can checkout their blog. Lots of goodies coming soon to Safari.
• http://webkit.org/blog/
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Hawkman said 2:07PM on 5-08-2008
Have actually been considering repressing this with a user stylesheet. It seems like a great idea, until you discover that 90% of the designers who use this have atrocious taste... :)
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Reefdog said 3:29PM on 5-08-2008
Agreed. So much. Nonstandard form controls bother the tar out of me. Of course, if I used IE, I probably wouldn't mind...
Joshua Ochs said 3:57PM on 5-08-2008
Amen. I have friends who run a professional web design company (who do quite excellent, tasteful work actually), and when they complained about Safari's using native controls, I looked at them like they were from Mars. They want everything on the page to look like their design; I want my browser to look like it's part of my computer and OS.
Rhywun said 4:16PM on 5-08-2008
This is another reason - among many others - I think the web is an awful application platform, and trying to turn it into one has been a huge mistake. It's hard enough to get people to figure out how to use your software when one button looks like every other button. Now you have to teach people how to recognize *what's* a button on top of how to actually use your application. The only explanation I can come up with for this situation is that designers must get a sadistic glee watching their testers click on random bits of the page trying to figure out how to use it.
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smoke_tetsu said 11:55PM on 5-08-2008
Personally, I find those styled controls in the latest versions of safari to be ugly.. especially since they aren't even smooth. I wish Apple hadn't done that.
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