Steve Fenton

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Friday, 27th July 2012

HTML form elements have not traditionally been the sexiest thing on The Web, but I would like to put forward my case for leaving their styles alone rather than making them look slick and glossy.

The arguments for such a bold move are really very simple.

Although the default style may not look great today, whatever style you will come up with will only look better for the next few months. When the user updates their browser, default styles will be brought up to date - but custom styles will start to age. Do you want to commit to updating your buttons whenever trends move on?

The default style in your browser may not look that great, but users of other browsers or on different operating systems might be used to really great looking buttons. Your custom buttons may look incredibly shabby to these users.

The default style will be very familiar to the user. They will have seen it a great deal. There is the possibility that your custom style will make it harder for the user to choose what to do.

The default style will adapt to the device. On a touch device, the element may appear much bigger or have a different behaviour that makes it more usable for that style of device. Your custom style might make it harder for people to use your page on different devices.

So use default styles and celebrate the goodness it gives you across browsers, operating systems and devices.