Advanced Form Control Styling With Selectmenu And Anchoring API — Smashing Magazine

No doubt you’ve had to style a <select> menu before. And when you do, you often have had to reach far down in your CSS arsenal of tricks or rely on JavaScript to get anything near the level of customization you want. It’s a long-running headache in the front-end world.

Well, thanks to the efforts of the Open UI community, we have a new <selectmenu> element to look forward to, and its purpose is to provide CSS styling affordances to selection menus in ways we’ve never had before.

We’re going to demonstrate an initial implementation of <selectmenu> in this article. But we’ll throw in a couple of twists while we’re at it. What we’re making is a radial select menu, something we could never have done with CSS alone. And since we’re working with experimental tech, we’re going to toss in more experimental features along the way, including images, the HTML Popover API, and the CSS Anchor Positioning API. The result is going to wind up like this:

We’ll start with a small bit of context about the work Open UI is doing and the APIs we’re putting to use. From there, we’ll cover the various parts of ...