- From: Mason Freed via GitHub <noreply@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:56:32 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
Generally, I'm quite afraid of the slippery slope of "distasteful", "feels off", "lacks polish", or "pleasant". Those are all design aesthetic related, and design aesthetic (almost by definition somehow?) changes over time. A majority of people look back at designs from 5-10 years ago and think "that looks so old and unpleasant". I want to make sure we're not trying to lock `appearance:base` into being an always-up-to-date design system. It isn't, and practically *can't be*. We only update these things once every few decades. The `appearance:base` styles are the *substrate* for design systems. There's another reading of the proposal above, which is that the form controls shouldn't **confuse the user** by being broken in some way. That, also, can be a slippery slope, since how controls function can change over time. But this rate of change is quite a bit slower than the design aesthetics of those controls. And also this is the one that is likely to cause bugs/problems, rather than "just" developer distaste and added work to update CSS to keep up with the times. Can we re-formulate the criteria to mention "brokenness", and not "distaste"? And perhaps instead of "**feel** usable", "**be** usable by a majority of users" or similar? -- GitHub Notification of comment by mfreed7 Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/13609#issuecomment-5071792134 using your GitHub account -- Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config
Received on Friday, 24 July 2026 15:56:33 UTC