I've been thinking about whether designers should be able to be in control of the properties of scrollbars and drop down list boxes on websites, and more importantly, whether these properties should be implimented in CSS, for years. Anne van Kesteren made a nice post with some of his ideas on the subject. I used this opportunity to express some thoughts that have been spooking in my brain for some time now. Here is what I wrote:
In my opinion, the scrollbars and drop down list boxes of an element on a website are just as much part of the visual design as buttons, input fields, etc. This being said, I feel it would only be logical if the properties of these elements would/could be defined/handled by the media that takes care of the visual presentation, being style sheets (not necessarily CSS). This is already the case for many elements like input fields and textareas, but also for attributes like the borders and legend of a fieldset.
We could argue about the scrollbar of the :root element, as this one could be considered as being part of the user agent/ client software. However, the scrollbars, etc. that appear within the webpage should be considered part of the website, and not the client software.
Again, this is my opinion, but frankly, I don't think we have seen the last of this in W3C's technical reports.
P.S. I am in no way trying to imply that the W3C should integrally adapt the current scrollbar volor property hack that exist on the WWW today.
Sincerly,
ACJ
A nice new website has been brought to my attention by Stopdesign. It's been added to my list of external links.
12:58AM