I think they should look different, and decades of operating system UI design would agree. A key here is that a combo box should not look like a drop-down, it should look like an input with a special affordance for showing preset values.
In the OOjs UI Apex theme, selects are outlined only:
[image: Inline image 3]
While inputs (and combo boxes) have a gentle inner shadow:
[image: Inline image 1] [image: Inline image 2]
These designs may be old, and I wasn't able to remove the red marks because whoever made the PDF baked them right into the raster graphics for the controls, but this is presumably how combo boxes and dropdowns are meant to be rendered in MediaWiki[1]:
[image: Inline image 4]
I think that at-a-glance the controls look very input-like, and that's a potential problem.
Perhaps May could share a more recent version of this design?
- Trevor
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=File:Agora_specs.pdf&page=9
On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 10:55 AM, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
So... I still lack an answer to my original question. I understand styling select elements involves care, but I'm asking whether they /should/ be styled like mw-ui-inputs or in a completely different way that needs to be implemented.
On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 10:17 AM, Trevor Parscal tparscal@wikimedia.org wrote:
Today, I am starting work on the Agora theme for OOUI. So, you could use
one
of those widgets to solve this problem very soon without having to mix themes.
- Trevor
On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 10:13 AM, Shahyar Ghobadpour sghobadpour@wikimedia.org wrote:
This is why I advised people to stop using mw-ui-input/mw-ui-button on elements like this. It isn't consistent and can actually be quite inaccessible on some browser/OS combinations.
--Shahyar
On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 12:56 PM, Prateek Saxena <psaxena@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Last time I tried this—and its been a while—select elements can't be styled consistently across browsers. The only way to do that would be to write some kind of a (OOUI) JS component.
—prtksxna
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-- Jon Robson
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