> And the same goes even more so for controls which are more complex than the checkbox.
HTML has a lot of virtually useless controls due to their limited styling. And yeah, sometimes you want custom-looking checkboxes, because you just fucking do and design matters. Also, on some browsers, checkboxes don't even have the lauded accessibility you're thinking about -- I recall a time where zooming in in Chrome wouldn't change the size of checkboxes!
Those aren't even the most egregious examples, to be honest.
> Also, on some browsers, checkboxes don't even have the lauded accessibility you're thinking about
In which case, people with accessibility needs won't be using that browser. And that's the whole point. The user can pick whichever browser works best for them, and implements the standard controls in the way they want. (Or, in the way that sucks the least, out of the browsers available to them.) And if they decide to get a better browser (different engine, or even just a major upgrade to the current one) suddenly all their websites work better. More importantly, they all work better in exactly the same way, so they only have to get used to any differences once, rather than for each and every website.
If you go and write your own version of a standard control which implements it that way you want, you take that away from the user.
HTML allows you to specify the semantics of the controls you want, and have the user-agent bother with the details about how it works. That's going to be more lightweight, more performant, and more user-friendly for more people than any alternative you bodge together yourself.
The best thing about using standard controls for things in that as things get better. You get it for free. The zoom bug gets fixed.
I have a bunch of legacy custom controls I deal with regularly because things like color pickers were not cool enough in 2009. The down side is that in 2022 they regularly break and require dev time to fix so some report that gets run once a year works correctly.
I agree, I know eventually the datalist won't lag on scroll with even just 100 items in their datalist control, and that they'll name their dropdown picker to something other than "-webkit-calendar-picker-indicator" since it's misleading https://jsfiddle.net/klesun/mfgteptf/ If I sound passive it's because I assumed a native control/component would be performant and switched out a lot of controls for it only to have to revert back to a custom solution. But ultimately they will be fixed and it'll happen to us transparently which is nice.
HTML has a lot of virtually useless controls due to their limited styling. And yeah, sometimes you want custom-looking checkboxes, because you just fucking do and design matters. Also, on some browsers, checkboxes don't even have the lauded accessibility you're thinking about -- I recall a time where zooming in in Chrome wouldn't change the size of checkboxes!
Those aren't even the most egregious examples, to be honest.