Native HTML Form Controls can be some of the most painful elements to style and customize. 25 years after the first HTML Standard introduced them and developers have resorted to building custom controls from scratch to achieve what they need to. I’ll discuss the history behind native form controls, where we’re at presently with using CSS to style them and take a look at the proposed solutions by standards groups and browser vendors to standardize controls and solve the pain points developers have been complaining about for years.

CSS is a visual styling language which we author with text/code. While code is the most flexible way, sometimes, it feels like we’re on the wrong abstraction level.

It wasn’t always like that though. And I hope it doesn’t stay that way forever. Let’s talk about the past, the present and the great renaissance that is upon us.

The idea of container queries has been floating around for at least a decade. Let’s take a look at the evolution of this idea, the challenges, why it hasn’t been implemented, its future, and algorithmic layouts we can achieve with CSS today.