Advanced Form Styling

What can be done about the "ugly" elements?

Now let's turn our attention to the "ugly" controls - the ones that are really hard to thoroughly style. In short, these are drop-down boxes, complex control types like color and datetime-local, and feedback-oriented controls like <progress> and <meter>.

The problem is that these elements have very different default looks across browsers, and while you can style them in some ways, some parts of their internals are literally impossible to style.

If you are prepared to live with some differences in look and feel, you can get away with some simple styling to make sizing consistent, uniform styling of things like background-colors, and usage of appearance to get rid of some system-level styling.

Take the following example, which shows a number of the "ugly" form features in action:

This example has the following CSS applied to it:

body {
  font-family: "Josefin Sans", sans-serif;
  margin: 20px auto;
  max-width: 400px;
}

form > div {
  margin-bottom: 20px;
}

select {
  appearance: none;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
}

.select-wrapper {
  position: relative;
}

.select-wrapper::after {
  content: "▼";
  font-size: 1rem;
  top: 3px;
  right: 10px;
  position: absolute;
}

button,
label,
input,
select,
progress,
meter {
  display: block;
  font-family: inherit;
  font-size: 100%;
  margin: 0;
  box-sizing: border-box;
  width: 100%;
  padding: 5px;
  height: 30px;
}

input[type="text"],
input[type="datetime-local"],
input[type="color"],
select {
  box-shadow: inset 1px 1px 3px #ccc;
  border-radius: 5px;
}

label {
  margin-bottom: 5px;
}

button {
  width: 60%;
  margin: 0 auto;
}

Note: If you want to test these examples across a number of browsers simultaneously, you can find it live here (also see here for the source code).

Also bear in mind that we've added some JavaScript to the page that lists the files selected by the file picker, below the control itself. This is a simplified version of the example found on the <input type="file"> reference page.

As you can see, we've done fairly well at getting these to look uniform across modern browsers.

We've applied some global normalizing CSS to all the controls and their labels, to get them to size in the same way, adopt their parent font, etc., as mentioned in the previous article:

button,
label,
input,
select,
progress,
meter {
  display: block;
  font-family: inherit;
  font-size: 100%;
  margin: 0;
  box-sizing: border-box;
  width: 100%;
  padding: 5px;
  height: 30px;
}

We also added some uniform shadow and rounded corners to the controls on which it made sense:

input[type="text"],
input[type="datetime-local"],
input[type="color"],
select {
  box-shadow: inset 1px 1px 3px #ccc;
  border-radius: 5px;
}

On other controls like range types, progress bars, and meters they just add an ugly box around the control area, so it doesn't make sense.

Let's talk about some specifics of each of these types of control, highlighting difficulties along the way.

Selects and datalists

In modern browsers, selects and datalists are generally not too bad to style provided you don't want to vary the look and feel too much from the defaults.

We've managed to get the basic look of the boxes looking pretty uniform and consistent. The datalist control is <input type="text"> anyway, so we knew this wouldn't be a problem.

Two things are slightly more problematic. First of all, the select's "arrow" icon that indicates it is a dropdown differs across browsers. It also tends to change if you increase the size of the select box, or resize in an ugly fashion. To fix this in our example we first used our old friend appearance: none to get rid of the icon altogether:

select {
  appearance: none;
}

We then created our own icon using generated content. We put an extra wrapper around the control, because ::before/::after don't work on <select> elements (this is because generated content is placed relative to an element's formatting box, but form inputs work more like replaced elements - their display is generated by the browser and put in place - and therefore don't have one):

<label for="select">Select a fruit</label>
<div class="select-wrapper">
  <select id="select" name="select">
    <option>Banana</option>
    <option>Cherry</option>
    <option>Lemon</option>
  </select>
</div>

We then use generated content to generate a little down arrow, and put it in the right place using positioning:

.select-wrapper {
  position: relative;
}

.select-wrapper::after {
  content: "▼";
  font-size: 1rem;
  top: 6px;
  right: 10px;
  position: absolute;
}

The second, slightly more important issue is that you don't have control over the box that appears containing the options when you click on the <select> box to open it. You can inherit the font set on the parent, but you won't be able to set things like spacing and colors. The same is true for the autocomplete list that appears with <datalist>.

If you really need full control over the option styling, you'll have to either use some kind of library to generate a custom control, or build your own custom control, or in the case of select use the multiple attribute, which makes all the options appear on the page, sidestepping this particular problem:

<label for="select">Select fruits</label>
<select id="select" name="select" multiple>
  …
</select>

Of course, this might also not fit in with the design you are going for, but it's worth noting!

Date input types

The date/time input types (datetime-local, time, week, month) all have the same major associated issue. The actual containing box is as easy to style as any text input, and what we've got in this demo looks fine.

However, the internal parts of the control (e.g. the popup calendar that you use to pick a date, the spinner that you can use to increment/decrement values) are not stylable at all, and you can't get rid of them using appearance: none;. If you really need full control over the styling, you'll have to either use some kind of library to generate a custom control, or build your own.

Note: It is worth mentioning <input type="number"> here too - this also has a spinner that you can use to increment/decrement values, so potentially suffers from the same problem. However, in the case of the number type the data being collected is simpler, and it is easy to just use a tel input type instead which has the appearance of text, but displays the numeric keypad in devices with touch keyboards.

Range input types

<input type="range"> is annoying to style. You can use something like the following to remove the default slider track completely and replace it with a custom style (a thin red track, in this case):

input[type="range"] {
  appearance: none;
  background: red;
  height: 2px;
  padding: 0;
  outline: 1px solid transparent;
}

However, it is very difficult to customize the style of the range control's drag handle - to get full control over range styling you'll need to use a whole bunch of complex CSS code, including multiple non-standard, browser-specific pseudo-elements. Check out Styling Cross-Browser Compatible Range Inputs with CSS on CSS tricks for a detailed write-up of what's needed.

Color input types

Input controls of type color are not too bad. In supporting browsers, they tend to just give you a block of solid color with a small border.

You can remove the border, just leaving the block of color, using something like this:

input[type="color"] {
  border: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

However, a custom solution is the only way to get anything significantly different.

File input types

Inputs of type file are generally OK - as you saw in our example, it is fairly easy to create something that fits in OK with the rest of the page - the output line that is part of the control will inherit the parent font if you tell the input to do so, and you can style the custom list of file names and sizes in any way you want; we created it after all.

The only problem with file pickers is that the button provided that you press to open the file picker is completely unstylable - it can't be sized or colored, and it won't even accept a different font.

One way around this is to take advantage of the fact that if you have a label associated with a form control, clicking the label will activate the control. So you could hide the actual form input using something like this:

input[type="file"] {
  height: 0;
  padding: 0;
  opacity: 0;
}

And then style the label to act like a button, which when pressed will open the file picker as expected:

label[for="file"] {
  box-shadow: 1px 1px 3px #ccc;
  background: linear-gradient(to bottom, #eee, #ccc);
  border: 1px solid rgb(169, 169, 169);
  border-radius: 5px;
  text-align: center;
  line-height: 1.5;
}

label[for="file"]:hover {
  background: linear-gradient(to bottom, #fff, #ddd);
}

label[for="file"]:active {
  box-shadow: inset 1px 1px 3px #ccc;
}

You can see the result of the above CSS styling in the below live example (see also styled-file-picker.html live, and the source code).

Meters and progress bars

<meter> and <progress> are possibly the worst of the lot. As you saw in the earlier example, we can set them to the desired width relatively accurately. But beyond that, they are really difficult to style in any way. They don't handle height settings consistently between each other and between browsers, you can color the background, but not the foreground bar, and setting appearance: none on them makes things worse, not better.

It is easier to just create your own custom solution for these features, if you want to be able to control the styling, or use a third-party solution such as progressbar.js.

The article How to build custom form controls provides an example of how to build a custom designed select with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.